Whitting looking for areas to ‘scale back’
With COVID-19 pandemic affecting budgets, Cougars coach considering costs of travel
Before the coronavirus pandemic, University of Houston coach Todd Whitting mostly had finalized the 2021 baseball schedule.
At a time when athletic departments look to make cuts across the board, the Cougars’ schedule got a head start with no nonconference trips requiring air travel.
“Just worked out that way,” Whitting said.
All told, the Cougars will make only three or four out-of-state trips in American Athletic Conference play. Of those weekend series, Whitting said the Cougars could look to make cost-cutting moves with bus trips to nearby Tulane, and even Wichita State and Memphis.
“Those are long (trips) but doable,” Whitting said. “Outside of that, you are not going to bus to East Carolina. We’ve just got to work through those things.”
Even though games are still 10 months away, Whitting said he must plan budgets in advance. UH had $343,000 in travel expenses in 2018, according to the latest NCAA financial report.
“There’s going to be some things in our program that we are going to have to scale back a little bit,” Whitting said.
UH is scheduled to join Nebraska, Illinois and Texas A&M-Corpus Christi at the Whataburger baseball tournament in Corpus Christi. Next season also will feature the start of a home-andhome series with Oklahoma. The first series will be in Norman, another trip the Cougars plan to bus rather than fly.
“As the guy running the program,” Whitting said, “you have to understand that and embrace it and roll up our sleeves and see what we can do without for a year or so and still put a competitive team on the field and still compete for a national championship.”
Any possible travel restrictions also could impact UH’s home schedule, which begins with a season-opening series against Holy Cross and includes another series against Bradley. UH typically hosts regional midweek games, along with the annual three-game Silver Glove Series against crosstown rival Rice and Don Sanders Cup against Sam Houston State.
“You just hope those nonconference teams have the ability to get on a plane and come this way, that their administration allows them to do it,” Whitting said. “[Our schedule] is set, but it’s also pretty fluid at this point. Our schedule could definitely change.”
One schedule casualty of the COVID-19 health crisis likely is to be a round-robin tournament that was to be played in Florida during the first weekend of AAC play. The plan called for four teams to play on the South Florida campus in Tampa and four more at Central Florida in Orlando. The games would count in league play and would help cut down on travel.
The AAC is expected to scrap the idea for 2021 and instead have teams find “common” opponents — Tulane for Houston in past seasons — and play six games during the regular season.
As of now, Whitting said there has been no drastic measures under consideration among the league’s coaches to alter the conference schedule.
“At the end of the day, we all still want to have college baseball,” Whitting said. “We are trying to protect the integrity of our schedule and integrity of our conference.”