Inside Family Travel Based on College Sports Schedules

Crissy and Madison McEntire first started traveling to watch their son, Will, play baseball when he was in elementary school. They didn’t know at the time, of course, that he would go on to be one of the top high school pitchers in Arkansas, eventually securing a spot at the University of Arkansas and pitching in the College World Series. They just knew that his traveling youth baseball team, the Bryant All-Stars—named for their little hometown 20 minutes southwest of Little Rock, Arkansas—kept showing up and winning area tournaments.

Winning in central Arkansas meant invitations to regional and national tournaments. One year it was Louisiana. Another it was the border town of Eagle Pass, Texas. Those games were so near the Rio Grande that you could smack a home run into the river. The parents repeatedly warned their 10 year olds not to wander across the border.

The Bryant All-Stars kept winning that year, and the family wound up at the World Series for their division in Winchester, Virginia, almost a thousand miles from home, to watch their kid pitch. It’s no wonder they, like so many other American families, have come to treat their college athlete’s season schedule as a family travel itinerary.

The NCAA counts more than half a million students competing each year across dozens of men’s and women’s sports. The parents who dare to keep up with those kids’ travels require stamina and resourcefulness that could be considered athletic in its own right.

For students like Will McEntire who played during seasons affected by the pandemic, the road has been particularly long. Spring sports in 2020-2021 were canceled mid-season, which the NCAA decided was grounds to give those athletes another season of eligibility, if they wanted. If you look around the stands this year and find the parents of seniors and so-called super seniors, you’ll know, they’ve seen some things.

How do they do it? With a big calendar at the start of the year, for one. They scheme out personal and sick days, negotiate with bosses and coworkers, and log in remotely from hotel lobbies (the one lasting blessing from the pandemic). They book their lodging months in advance, before prices balloon, and they sign up for the credit card at the hotel chain closest to their kid’s home stadium, for the points. Some even relocate in-season, moving close to their kids’ school for months at a stretch while renting out their own home.

Also, they drive. During their son’s college years, Madison and Crissy have mostly seen the 200-mile, three-hour drive from Bryant to Fayetteville. Madison, an engineer and an amateur statistician, says he’s racked up 53 of those trips alone. And looking back at his sheaf of ticket stubs, he figures that between 2020 and 2024 they put an extra 41,000 miles on their 2013 Chevy Tahoe going to Will’s games: By the end of his college career this year, that total will approximate two full trips around the Earth’s equator. And that doesn’t count the trips they drove separately when things like a wedding or a surgery kept them from traveling together. (Madison sent these calculations via a long text that he concluded with a single mind-blown emoji.)

They’ve driven all over the Southeast, mostly with Madison behind the wheel nodding to the countdowns on Sirius XM’s ‘80s on 8 channel while Crissy tries to catch a nap and not get carsick. In Auburn, Alabama, Madison posed next to the campus’s Bo Jackson statue, and on Kentucky Derby weekend in Lexington, Crissy and other Arkansas moms rolled up with Razorbacks-themed Derby hats.

Their stops are modest, if they get to stop at all. Getting to Columbia, South Carolina required a 24-hour round trip on the road to watch three games in two days. They’re not too keen on visiting Texas A&M’s Blue Bell Park—the students there pound the metal bleachers with rings, one helluva racket—but they do make a point to stop at Buc-ee’s when in Texas. Wherever they go, they do their best to take Will out for a meal and to bring along other players who could use some adoptive parents for the weekend.

The one time they opted for a plane ticket was 2022, when Arkansas went to North Carolina to play for a berth in the College World Series. Madison and Crissy flew to those games, and met up with a couple of old college classmates who used the games as an excuse to fly in from Seattle for a mini-reunion.

A few days after they returned from that trip, they were out driving when the lights in the Tahoe’s dash flared up. They pulled into a gas station to cool down and found it wouldn’t start again. Turns out they had finally run their transmission into the ground. Its final resting place was two short miles from their house.

Youth sports didn’t always make demands like these. The difference today is that even when a high school’s team isn’t in season, other amateur teams are competing—insisting, practically, that teenagers with college-sports ambitions play year–round to stay sharp and to get as much exposure as possible.

“Some people who haven’t participated in sports or been a youth sport parent, they might say, ‘wow, these people are crazy,’” said Chris Martinovic, whose son, Niko, is a rising high-school senior at Bentonville High School in northwest Arkansas, and a top college prospect as a punter.

Chris played youth soccer as a kid, and remembers traveling around the Northeast for tournaments, blowing out the candles on his 10th birthday cake at a hotel. He and his wife, Marcy, met in college, at Seton Hall, in New Jersey, and traveled often to watch basketball and soccer—their honeymoon in Japan, no less, included a World Cup match. As an adult he has coached elite youth soccer, driving to Colorado for his older son Kristian to play in the national championship.

Even with his experience, Chris is struck at how much dedication it takes to keep up with his own kids.

“We spend a lot of time in front of the calendar,” he said. “Frequently we get together to talk about the schedule. Sometimes it’s for the week, sometimes it’s for the month, sometimes it’s for six months. Are we all going to go as a family? Or are we divide-and-conquer? There are overlapping initiatives.”

And even the most maniacal planning eventually confronts some kind of surprise. They were in Gatlinburg, Tennessee for a four-day camp this summer when they found their flight home had been canceled. As his parents fretted, the high schooler suggested: Let’s rent a car. And so at 2 pm on a Sunday they piled into a rental and started the 12-hour drive back to northwest Arkansas.

“In the middle of the country, it’s hard,” Chris said. “From here it’s five hours to Dallas, three-and-a-half to Kansas City, three-and-change to Oklahoma City. You get beyond that, driving gets a little harder.” He does some back-of-the-envelope math. A lot of factors will go into his son’s choice of college—the chance to play, the vibe with the coaches and players, the quality of the business program Niko intends to pursue. The right fit could be a half-hour down the highway in Fayetteville, or it could be a thousand miles away. “If he ends up achieving his dream of playing Division I football,” Chris concludes, “our goal is to be at as many [games] as we can.”

There’s a price to being in the stands, beyond the cost of a ticket. As the McEntires can tell you, the most nervous person in any baseball stadium is the pitcher’s mother. When she watched her son pitch in 2022, the first year where he really got a shot to play, and on a team that finished the year No. 3 in the country, Crissy’s nerves got so frayed her arms would go numb, from her shoulders to her fingertips.

Last season, Will got the ignominious distinction of coming into a 0-0 game in the bottom of the 11th inning at Texas A&M, with the bases loaded, and walking the one batter he faced. Run scored, game over. The Aggies fans went berserk, pounding those damn metal bleachers. Crissy wept. She and Madison said nothing as Will walked with his head down to the team bus.

“All we did was sent him a text that said ‘are you going to be OK?’” Madison said. “And we got a reply about 10 hours later that said, ‘I’ll be OK.’”

“It’s just rough,” Crissy said. “Stuff like that does shift the demeanor of the trip, especially if that’s the first game on the road.”

“I always say,” her husband added, “if you win that first game, you’re kind of playing with house money.”

A better memory was at North Carolina in 2022, with that trip to the College World Series on the line. Arkansas won the first in the best-of-three series, and Will started Game 2. He struck out four batters and didn’t allow a run in more than five innings on the mound, as Arkansas won 4-3. For a kid who had been frustrated with a lack of playing time, it was an indelible memory. He cried as he hugged his parents.

“I remember talking and whispering in his ear. I told him how proud I was of him,” Madison said. “I said, ‘You’re going to the World Series.’”

Omaha, where the College World Series is held, is not a short road trip from central Arkansas: more than 600 miles each way, and a fair distance from the cheaper motels in the outskirts of town to the stadium. Arkansas made it to the semifinals that year, and again it was Will on the mound pitching lights-out to get them past Auburn into that round, striking out nine batters in seven innings. After the game, between interviews, Will hopped a fence and crowded together with his parents, his sister, and her husband.

“I thought if we’re all together, everybody’s here, and this is a very special moment,” Crissy said. “He hates taking family Christmas photos. I say, ‘Let’s take our family Christmas picture. Get it over and done.’”

The date was June 21—the first day of summer. Sports parents remain undefeated on long-range planning.

Want more Thrillist? Follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube.