McCollum's Column: Just getting here was six-month job for Jackson
HONOLULU — By day and part of the night, Hud Jackson works the University of Central Arkansas’ running backs and is the assistant head coach.
By night and in whatever spare time, he’s been a travel agent extraordinaire.
The fact that the Bears, 91 strong in their travel party, checked into their hotel quietly, smoothly and without fanfare Wednesday night is a testament to the relentless work of Jackson. When the contract to play the University of Hawaii here was signed in February, Jackson went immediately to work on the logistics.
There were many to tie together.
No UCA athletic team has taken more people a longer distance.
Jackson has handled the Bears’ travel arrangements for the last three years.
But this one was a whole lot more complicated.
He had to arrange all the details to get a 91-person traveling party to Hawaii. That meant dealing with key folks five time zones away. That meant arranging travel by bus to Dallas, then by commercial aircraft to Honolulu.
You know all the issues of taking your family to the Gulf each summer. Multiply that by about 25.
“There are not enough superlatives to describe what kind of a job he did to make things go so smoothly,” UCA coach Clint Conque said.
“What made this complicated was a lot of separate issues,” Jackson said. “First, there was the transportation, which involved both bus and air. Then, there was arranging practice times in Hawaii and getting all that set up. Then, there was the trip to Pearl Harbor, which was a separate arrangement. Then, there are the issues and logistics in Hawaii that includes finding buffet meals for our players that don’t cost an arm and a leg.”
Along the way, Jackson met a lot of people (mostly over the phone), and he had a lot of help from both the mainland and Hawaii.
“One good thing is people here in Hawaii are used to hosting football teams,” Jackson said. “They’ve hosted the Pro Bowl since Day I, they host bowl games and teams in the WAC travel to Hawaii every year. They know what to do.”
“It certainly wasn’t Hawaii’s first rodeo at this, but it was ours,” Conque said.
“The tough part is when you’re dealing with people this far away, it’s almost like they were in another country,” Jackson said. “Most of it was just developing relationships. The people in Hawaii have been absolutely great in helping arrange everything we wanted to do. We arrive here and their stadium people and the equipment people have everything ready for our practice. The equipment people washed our practice gear overnight so we could practice the next day. I told our trainers and managers to do what these folks tell them because they know what they are doing.”
Nowadays, one of the trickiest parts — and potentially where real problems occur — is being able to get a 91-person traveling party through airport security for commercial flight without extraordinary tie-ups and delays.
“I got to know the TSA guys in Dallas and they did an incredible job in what they did in getting us through,” Jackson said. “They made us feel like we were the most important football team on the planet. It made the kids feel really good.”
He may not know the last names, but Jackson says he has new best friends in Ken and Chris at Aloha Stadium and Christian at the Marriott Waikiki and Andy, who operates a buffet restaurant in Waikiki.
It’s more efficient and less expensive for the UCA players to have buffet meals, but there are not many relatively inexpensive ones in most places.
One of Jackson’s brother-in-laws visited Hawaii recently.
“He ate an amazing buffet at a reasonable price and he told me about it,” Jackson said.
The coach connected with Andy at the restaurant and made arrangements for it to stay open later to accommodate the Bears after their practice session Wednesday evening.
“I sent him a UCA hat and shirt and he was said he was going to wear it when we showed up,” Jackson said. “I figured that would probably get our players fired up.”
Yep. Wear the UCA gear and get out of the way of the stampede to the food line.
(Sports columnist David McCollum can be reached at 505-1235 or david.mccollum@thecabin.net)
