A winding road: Trip to Appalachian State will be different for Charlotte 49ers’
The tenor of this college football season has changed in so many ways due to the coronavirus. It’s difficult to quantify exactly how a team like the Charlotte 49ers will react.
One area where the 49ers are facing major changes is travel. The entire calculation of Charlotte’s season is different now, with a road-dominated schedule, games being played without fans through at least the end of September, as well as new travel protocols put in place to keep the team safe from the virus.
That all starts Saturday, when the 49ers travel to Boone to face Appalachian State in both teams’ season opener. The game was only scheduled in August — and how and when Charlotte heads up the mountain will be different than the manner in which the team traveled in 2019 when the Mountaineers won 56-41 in Kidd Brewer Stadium.
Normally, a Football Bowl Subdivision team tries to schedule six home and six away games in a 12-game regular season. But thanks to the cancellation of two nonconference games and another with a Conference USA home game against Old Dominion, Charlotte will play just 11 games, a mere four of them at Jerry Richardson Stadium.
The 49ers replaced an away game with Tennessee (originally scheduled for Sept. 5) and a home game with Norfolk State with road games against Appalachian State on Saturday and 18th-ranked North Carolina on Sept. 19. The ODU game wasn’t rescheduled.
“You know, I just think the pageantry of college football,” 49ers coach Will Healy said. “We’d be talking about the Tennessee game right now, you know if things were to have gone as planned, playing in front of 107,000 people. I love when our guys have those experiences. Whether you’re home or away, you know you feed off energy and you feed off fans.”
Substituting games against the No. 25 Volunteers (a game that would have been a huge challenge for Charlotte) and the Football Championship Subdivision’s Spartans with the Mountaineers and Tar Heels is something about which Healy has joked:
“Does (athletics director Mike Hill) really want me here, or is he just trying to make sure my career record continues to go in the wrong direction?” he said.
It does make the 49ers’ quest for a second consecutive bowl appearance that much tougher (a team must have at least a .500 record to be eligible for the postseason). Charlotte’s other nonconference games are at home against Georgia State on Sept. 26 and at Duke on Oct. 31. Four of the first five games are on the road.
The 49ers’ travel protocols will differ drastically from past years.
For the Appalachian State game, the 49ers would normally travel in four buses -- three for the team, another for family and support staff. In 2019, the 49ers stayed in a hotel in Hickory (midway between Charlotte and Boone) on Friday night, where they had dinner, received a pep talk from Healy and then enjoyed a late-night ice cream treat.
For this season’s game, the team will depart campus late Friday afternoon in six buses — all for players and coaches so they can be socially distanced during the ride (families won’t be going this season with fans not allowed at the game). First stop will be a hotel across the street from UNC Charlotte, where the team will eat dinner in a banquet room.
Then the 49ers will travel all the way to Boone (there’s plenty of hotel space this season, again, due to the coronavirus), arriving around 9 p.m.
“We’ll have some ice cream for them, they’ll go to sleep and we’ll wake them up the next morning,” Healy said.
Healy and Mountaineers coach Shawn Clark have taken good-natured jabs at each other during the week. Healy said he was planning on having the 49ers stay at Clark’s house in Boone instead of a hotel. To which Clark replied:
“It’s different times. We know where they’re staying. We might have to pull a fire alarm one time, just for Will.”
Responded Healy: “Cheap trick. No hospitality up on the mountain, obviously.”
Assuming everybody gets a good night’s sleep, the 49ers will rise early for the noon kickoff. After breakfast and a walk through (possibly in the hotel’s parking lot), they’ll have their pregame team meetings in the temporary visitors locker room in a student recreation center across the street from Kidd Brewer Stadium.
“We’re going to pull out the highlight video,” Healy said. “I’ve told them I probably only have one good speech in me that day anyway, so we’ll just do it right before the game.”
The 49ers will then pull on their uniforms, which might not include new jerseys that were ordered several months ago. That’s because the jerseys hadn’t arrived as of Thursday. The 49ers are sporting a new logo, which will at least be featured on their helmets.
“This is not unique to Charlotte,” Healy said of the missing shipment. “Every school in the country is having this issue, because of the pandemic and supply-chain interruptions.
“Every day the FedEx truck comes in, I’m like, ‘There it is!’ And then it’s like: two pairs of gloves.”
They might have to make do with a 2019 look — something rare in college football this season.
Charlotte at Appalachian State
When: Noon, Saturday.
Where: Kidd Brewer Stadium, Boone.
TV: ESPN2.
This story was originally published September 10, 2020 at 5:18 PM.