Constant travel presents challenges to players
After nearly eight seasons playing in Major League Lacrosse, Steven Waldeck has developed a unique concept for a vacation.
On Thursday, the Ohio Machine will play at Boston before flying to Columbus to host Chesapeake on Saturday night at Fortress Obetz. And next Thursday, the Machine play at New York before a two-week break that includes the league’s all-star game.
In order to clear all the travel and demands with his day job as a ratings analyst for Standard & Poor’s at S&P Global, Waldeck has been saving his vacation days.
“There’s not too many people in the world, even for what we get paid or don’t, who say they’re a professional athlete — even if it is on the weekends,” Waldeck said from his Boston home. “There’s a lot of self-pride there.”
It’s a fact of life in the MLL, where getting time off for weekday games or travel for weekend ones can result in difficult conversations with the boss. The unified experience helps foster a strong team bond even if most players are together for fewer than 48 hours at a time during the week.
In Columbus, some of that time is spent turning the Downtown Holiday Inn into a pseudo-business center on days before home games.
“We have a lot of fun with that,” said Matt McMahon, a Machine defender who works in corporate finance in Stamford, Connecticut. “It’s definitely a more enjoyable workday than hanging around the office when you get to hang around with the team.”
The constant travel creates extra work for the team’s director of communications and public relations, Kaley Rentz, who doubles as the de facto director of team operations in charge of getting an entire roster where it needs to be on time.
Flight delays are common, and players have learned to quickly rebook flights and cajole airlines into getting them where they need to be as soon as possible. Often, players will arrive the day before a game and take a taxi directly from the airport to the field for a late-night practice.
This week’s schedule will force the Machine into one roster move. Third-year defensive midfielder Pat Harbeson, who lives in Phoenix, can’t get time off from work, so rookie Mike Messenger will make his professional debut in his place. Brian Karalunas, a six-year MLL veteran defender, will join the team for tonight’s game, then fly to New York on Friday morning to work at a law firm before flying to Columbus later that day and playing Saturday night.
Team captain Marcus Holman was interviewed for this story Tuesday night when he was in the Minneapolis airport while connecting to Boston from the University of Utah, where he coaches the men’s lacrosse team.
“You have to find that balance,” Holman said. “The guys that can manage that, it’s pretty impressive and it certainly builds their character because it’s not easy to do. This is the toughest outdoor lacrosse league in the world and those guys have high-paying jobs. For them to be successful at both is a testament to their character.”