8:30 a.m. -- The story behind the charter flight

LSU is scheduled to leave campus at 2:30 this afternoon and leave on a 3:30 charter flight for Gainesville, Fla. The Tigers will also charter when they play an early May series against Kentucky in Lexington, Ky.

This type of travel is -- if you'll pardon the term -- a departure for the baseball team. Previous trips to the more distant SEC destinations found the Tigers on buses, sleeper buses or commercial flights.

Paul Mainieri's first season as LSU's coach changed all that.

The Tigers opened SEC play last year at Columbia, S.C., but not before having an unscheduled 9-hour layover in the Atlanta airport.

"I think it was a natural 4-hour layover, and then there was a delay of the flight, and we had to sit there for another 5 hours," Mainieri said. "We got in so late. We left school at like 7 o'clock in the morning and didn't get into Columbia until 9 o'clock at night."

The Sunday game in that series was affected by the SEC travel curfew. Facing a deficit and a time limit, LSU found itself altering pitching strategy to try to get another turn at bat before the curfew, and a home run increased the deficit. The Tigers lost the game and the series.

In early May, LSU flew commercially to Arkansas the weekend before final exams. After winning two of three games, they took a bus from Fayetteville to the airport at Bentonville.

They found out their flight had been canceled and sat there for 2 hours trying to figure out a plan. They finally found a bus and a drive and rode back to Baton Rouge overnight.

"We pulled in at 7 o'clock in the morning after not sleeping all night riding on a bus," Mainieri said, "and then the kids had to go take exams. I just felt so bad for them."

Mainieri went to see LSU Athletic Director Skip Bertman.

"Arkansas charters everywhere," Mainieri remembers telling Bertman. "Mississippi State charters everywhere that's more than a 6-hour bus ride. Florida's chartering. Why do we have to play second fiddle to those type of schools when we're at LSU?"

Bertman understand and told Mainieri anything Bertman did for the baseball team, he would have to do for the softball team because of Title IX.

"We came to an agreement that there are three trips (each season) that are long enough to need to fly," Mainieri said, "and his agreement with me would be that we would charter for two of those three. For the third trip, we could choose to either fly commercial or take the sleeper buses.

"We took the sleeper buses to Tennessee this year, because I knew even though we weren't going to get back until 4 in the morning, we didn't have school the next day. It was spring break, and we didn't play again until Wednesday night. I thought their bodies could recover in time, so Gainesville and Lexington became the natural trips for charter."

Next year LSU's long-distance trips are to South Carolina, Georgia and Arkansas.

"One of those trips, again, is the weekend prior to spring break," Mainieri said, "so I'm going to purposely not schedule a Tuesday game, schedule on Wednesday, and we'll do the long drive when the kids have a day to rest."

Mainieri said one of the reasons the LSU job appealed to him before Bertman approached him in June 2006 was the prospect of fewer problems in traveling for conference games.

"We had to fly everywhere when I was at Notre Dame," he said. "It was always a hassle, but especially after September 11th occurred and security became greater, the planes became smaller, the flights became more limited. You had issues with your cargo -- how many bags you could take.

"You had to make connections all over the place, and you had to get to airports early enough to be able to get through security with 35 people to be able to make your flight. I got personally just very worn down from all the travel and having to do it that way."

Things were better in the SEC, but not as good as Mainieri expected.

"I guess I'm not very bright, but when I came to the SEC I thought everything was a bus ride," he said, laughing. "Only after I got here did I realize that wasn't the case. Then all of a sudden, two flights in my very first year -- one is delayed dramatically, and another one is canceled, causing us to drive through the night.

"So I went in and talked to the boss about it. He was very open-minded, so he gave us two charters and gave softball two charters. So, we're happy."

Mainieri said the Georgia-LSU series this season (April 18-20) is the Tigers' only conference series that will have a travel curfew for the Sunday game.

Got a comment or question for Carl? E-mail him at cdubois@theadvocate.com.