Traveling an NFL team internationally | Atlanta Falcons

[Music] My name is Brandon Ruth. I’m the senior director of operations with the Atlanta Falcons. Uh oversee all of our team travel and all of our facility operations here in Flowey Branch. Once the schedule comes out, obviously you’re looking at uh the cadence of travel, right? Like when’s our home games? Do we have any back-to-back road games? is obviously the international game is a whole different uh wrinkle that goes into it. And so you’re really trying to figure out like what your flow is and then obviously starting to call hotels uh seeing what the availability is uh to create the best experience for the players, coaches, and obviously our staff. Josh Nelson. Everyone here calls me Nelly. I’m the director of performance science and I’m an assistant strength coach in the weight room. When we first get the schedule, you know, it’s back in the springtime. Uh we try to get everybody together from a bunch of different groups. It could be from athletic training to strength and conditioning, performance science, nutrition. Everybody get together in one room and we just try to find what are the areas that could be traps for us. You know, it could be multiple road games in a row. It could be um challenging opponents that are coming back to back. A lot of things could could kind of create some scheduling conflicts, but at the end of the day, it’s just trying to find efficiencies in what we do. Try to keep things as simple and and consistent as possible. I have the best uh advanced team in the NFL and uh so Austin Montigu and Nicole Dennis uh they always go about 2 three days ahead of the team uh to basically be on uh be our on-site contacts to make sure that everything is set up uh accordingly to what we have contractually what we need for the team coming in. So that’s all of your hotel, that’s all of your team bus, stadium, police escort, uh trucking, all of those items that uh when I send them early, that’s what they’re going to do. uh we’re making sure everything is set and ready. So when I fly in with the team uh the day before the game and once we touch down and land, everything is good to go. So we’re not necessarily going in blind. For us, we have a rule, you know, the rule of threes. Watch out for day three cuz any third day of a new cycle, you’re like, man, this is I’m tired. Week three. Now, if you get to week three, it’s like, man, we’re doing the same thing every single day. You got to watch out for monotony. And then month three, the extended period of the season where things and fatigue start to accumulate almost like snow over time. So we have these frameworks that we’re thinking about trying to manage. But it’s just thinking big picture like that. It really helps us out. Back toback away games are easy by any stretch. Um you know it’s definitely taxing because you’re basically working on two trips at the same time. you’re working on uh two sets of rooming list, two sets of plane uh team charter uh manifest uh you know menus for two different uh hotels. Um everything that you could think of you’re working on at the exact same time. So it’s really being able to compartmentalize uh your mind and really focus on one trip at a time. It’s hard to replicate environmental conditions, you know, when you go to a northern climate, when you go to an international climate, but you just try to talk to your guys about being as consistent as possible. So the things that we can control, how do we make sure that we’re we’re handling those correctly. Um when you’re talking about traveling to different places, especially within different time zones, you can start to get a little bit more into the physiology of the body. And the neat thing I’ve mentioned before like Ari Cohen in the in the athletic training room, he’s amazing in terms of uh planning our sleep and wake cycles. Julie in the athlete training room. She’s worked in Germany for a long period of time in the past. So, she’s got firsthand knowledge of how we can get there. Uh we have colleagues and friends at NASA down in Houston. So, we’ve had conversations about how our astronauts actually phase shift forward and then phase shift back to make sure that they’re maintaining proper schedules. So, we’ve had good conversations and we got a really neat pool of people to talk to. [Music] we were scheduled to go to Indianapolis to play a game uh this year. So, we knew there was a chance that we could be selected uh to go overseas to play them for the game in Berlin. And so, uh once we did get notified officially a couple weeks before the schedule came out, it was immediately it was like, okay, what does this look like? First thing is uh passports. Uh so uh you know people honestly forget a lot of times that you know you see the international games and uh you know the passport piece is something that we have to do for over 200 uh people uh here. Obviously you have the the incoming and outgoing players that you have as the roster uh kind of builds throughout the year. So you have to stay on top of that. Uh so that’s a huge piece that goes into it. And then uh after that it’s really the you know your hotel, it’s your charter plane, it’s uh all those other details to get the team over there. Most of the time when you travel domestically like we do here in in the states, there’s not a lot of jet lag. Jet lag is just like a a massive change where my body’s clock and the actual clock in the location don’t jam. When we travel domestically, it’s not that much of a problem cuz it’s about three time zones either way. U but when we go to Germany, there’s some things that we can do to just make sure that we can get on that Germany clock a little bit faster. Um part of that is when we’re flying, as soon as we get on a plane, we’re going to encourage guys to have some food. um and then try to to fall asleep. We want them to sleep through uh the trip if they can and then once we get to Germany, we’re going to get them going. We don’t want them to go to the hotel and fall asleep. We’re actually going to have a quick little practice. Um it’s going to be a little shake out. It’s not going to be anything elaborate, but it just helps them to stay active um and to stay up a little bit more. And then when they go to bed that night, um it’ll be probably a little earlier um but when we wake up that next day, hopefully it’ll be a little bit closer to Germany time. Once all that kind of comes together, then it’s really just figuring out uh what the rest of the week looks like, how long we’re there, whether we have a short trip, whether we have a week-l long trip. Everybody does it a different way, but uh I feel really good about how we’re doing it this year. [Music]

Listen to Brandon Ruth (Sr. Director of Operations) and Josh Nelson (Director of Performance Science) break down what it takes to travel an NFL team.

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