On Nov. 5, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that it would require airlines to cut flights at 40 airports nationwide. The FAA said the move was necessary to keep travelers safe as air traffic controllers and other airport staff worked without pay during a prolonged government shutdown. The cuts were implemented incrementally, starting with 4% of flights on Nov. 7 and peaking at 6% Tuesday through Thursday.

The 40 airports that have had flights cut include several home airports for Ivy League schools: Boston Logan International, Philadelphia International and all three New York-area airports.

In the Ivy League, teams bus for most of their games, including every conference regular-season and tournament game. But some teams take commercial flights for select nonconference games, depending on distance and budget.

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Princeton started its season with a series of delays on Nov. 8 on its way to Atlanta to play Georgia Tech. Newark Liberty International Airport, where the Tigers eventually departed from, saw 20.3% of its incoming and outgoing flights canceled that day. The Atlanta airport had 18.9% of its flights canceled. Those were the two most affected airports that day.

The Tigers avoided a cancellation, but they boarded and deplaned twice before the third time was the charm. Their flight, originally scheduled to depart at 12:15 p.m., finally landed in Atlanta at 1:29 a.m. on Sunday.

The Tigers got as much rest as they could before the 2 p.m. tip and pulled off a 67-61 win. Afterward, their flight home was delayed and then canceled, so they drove several hours to Raleigh, North Carolina, for the night. Then they drove the remaining eight hours back to New Jersey on Monday, ending a one-of-a-kind homecoming trip for junior guard/forward Olivia Hutcherson.

“They were really amazing,” Princeton head coach Carla Berube told The IX Basketball on Saturday about her players. “It didn’t faze them. … Their attitude stayed really positive. …

“We were grateful to get down there and grateful to play that game. I’m grateful for the pilots and the flight attendants that were going through this and how their lives get flipped upside down.”

Harvard also had a series of delays returning from a loss at Michigan on Sunday. The Detroit airport is also among the airports facing cuts. Despite a relatively early tip-off time of noon, the Crimson were still traveling into the wee hours of Monday morning.

“I don’t think I got to my bed until 2 a.m., and I didn’t go to any type of recovery or have to unpack anything or walk home from the gym,” Harvard head coach Carrie Moore told reporters on Wednesday. “So who knows when our girls got to bed that night.”

That late night forced Harvard off the court on Monday. The Crimson watched film and had a walkthrough but couldn’t practice ahead of Tuesday’s loss at UMass. That was their third game in five days, including a season-opening win over St. John’s at home on Nov. 7.

“it’s kind of like being a professional basketball player,” Moore said. “They rarely practice. It’s just understanding you need rest, you need to mentally prepare yourself for the next opponent, and a lot of times it’s knowing who they are, but it’s more important that we show up at our best to give us a chance to win the game. So [we’re] learning those lessons along the way for sure.”

Meanwhile, Columbia had its flight home canceled after wins at Butler and Ohio. The Lions ended up staying overnight in Ohio on Sunday and flying home Monday instead. But they made the most of the extra time by going to the home of associate head coach Tyler Cordell’s mother on Sunday night.

“How you frame what’s happening is really critical,” Columbia head coach Megan Griffith told reporters on Thursday. “So the minute we found out our flight was canceled, we weren’t freaking out. It was like, ‘Hey guys, we’re figuring [it] out. We’re going to the airport area. We have a solution.’ … I’m all big on, seek solutions. Don’t tell me the problem. I already know the problem, right?

“So I think it’s just, how do you respond in those moments, and how do you demonstrate that for these young people?”

Brown was the luckiest of the four teams, as the Bears made it from Providence to Nashville and back for a Nov. 7 game at Belmont without major problems. Neither airport is among the 40 facing cuts. However, the Bears’ travel wasn’t perfect, either: They sat on their plane to Nashville for 90 minutes waiting to take off as a mechanic tried to fix a broken overhead bin.

“All of a sudden, like 90 minutes later, we hear clapping,” Brown head coach Monique LeBlanc told The IX Basketball on Thursday. “We’re like, ‘Oh, great, it’s fixed,’ and we’re taking off. Well … it was the very first overhead bin up front, and as we’re getting off, it was just covered in duct tape. So I was like, if we were just gonna duct tape it, dang, did we have to spend 90 minutes fiddling with it?”

That delay meant that Brown missed its practice time at Belmont. But with the help of in-flight WiFi, operations coordinator Logan Hatch arranged for the Bears to practice at Vanderbilt instead.

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Unfortunately for operations staffs leaguewide, flying will likely continue to be challenging, even though the government shutdown ended on Wednesday night. About 22.5% of flights have been delayed in all of 2025, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). That is about the same rate as in 2023 and 2024.

And on Friday, the FAA and the DOT announced that 3% of flights would continue to be cut “while the FAA monitors system performance … and evaluates whether normal operations can resume.” That is down from 6% during the shutdown but about double the 1.6% of flights that have been canceled for any reason in all of 2025. Weather also often snarls travel in the winter.

Ivy teams have more flights planned this season, including in the next few weeks. Harvard left on Thursday for two games in California and faced only a brief delay, according to a team spokesperson. Princeton, Columbia and Brown all have additional flights coming up. And Yale and Penn are slated to take their first flights of the season during Thanksgiving week.

Moore is preaching two things to her players when it comes to air travel: patience and taking care of their bodies. In an airport, the latter might look like stretching, taking walks if they’ve been sitting at a gate for a while, or using Normatec boots or massage guns.

“We do recovery in the airports,” Moore said. “… We do it on the buses. We do it in the hotels.”

She is also finding the positives in travel disruptions: Even if that time together isn’t the most fun, it’s still a bonding opportunity for her team. And that chemistry can have a real impact on winning close games.

Berube found another positive: Her players were able to do a lot of homework in transit during the first weekend of the season. But while speaking with The IX Basketball on a bus to College Park, Maryland, she admitted that her team was “happy to be on a bus, for sure,” rather than at the airport.

LeBlanc hasn’t changed much about how her program approaches travel amid the nationwide turbulence. But she said she might remind her players to bring an extra outfit, just in case.

“I feel like some of us that … [are] older and we’ve been traveling for a while, we know to pack extra clothes,” she said. “But we shouldn’t assume that the team would think of that.”

Noting the financial impact an extra day on the road has, Griffith said she is always trying to plan for unexpected travel disruptions and costs.

“In the future, we’re going to try to do as much as we can to get places as safely as possible and as quickly as possible,” she said. “So [that] doesn’t mean I’m like, ‘We’re making a change to something tomorrow.’ But you do have to prepare for a lot of different scenarios: best case, worst case, everything in between.”

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Yale hasn’t flown yet this season, but head coach Dalila Eshe told The IX Basketball on Thursday that she and her staff are “keeping an eye on” the situation as they prepare to fly to Washington, D.C., for a Nov. 26 game at American. If necessary, the Bulldogs will bus instead — though the roughly 5.5-hour drive could take much longer with Thanksgiving traffic.

Penn, however, doesn’t have much of a choice for two games in the state of Texas on Nov. 28 and 30. Head coach Mike McLaughlin told The IX Basketball on Thursday that travel plans are “hard to change at this point,” but he hopes that the shutdown ending will help things go more smoothly.

Ultimately, Ivy League players and coaches will roll with whatever curveballs are thrown their way. They are used to doing it on buses, including driving late into the night for back-to-back conference games and waiting out the occasional snowstorm. The recipe is the same for air travel.

“[Players are] extremely resilient,” Griffith said. “… We just have to give them more credit all the time because I think in college athletics, sometimes we try to protect them too much, and it’s like, they’re adults. They can handle this.”