Travel is something that can be easily overlooked by anyone who heads a sports team. Simply focusing on the game at hand and choosing to remain rigid on a pre-game planning is something coaches can easily get wrapped up in. 

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Pulaski Academy (Ark.) head coach Kevin Kelley chooses to remain fluid and patient during this time. “Football games are constantly not how you planned on them to go,” says the coach who never punts. “I purposefully don’t have all that detail right there. We have certain things that we have to do on time, but I’ll purposefully switch things up to teach our kids [that] when it doesn’t go right it’s going to be okay. We just go to the next thing.”

Kelley, whose style of play has been featured by ESPN and HBO, says that operating the traditional way can be detrimental. “Sometimes the other team leaves [their schedule] up on the wall. ‘5:07 we walk the field, 5:15 running backs [are] getting taped, 5:18 this is happening,’ and then [they] get all bent out of shape if the bus is 10 minutes late and it screws up the schedule … What that does is teaches us to get all bent out of shape if everything doesn’t go according to plan.”

There’s a story readily available for Kelley from the day of the interview. “Our bus was supposed to leave at 11:15 a.m. to go to Nashville from Little Rock, Arkansas,” begins Kelley. “But due to this or that, we had food coming in for the kids, [and] it was late, [so] we didn’t end up leaving until 11:55, 40 minutes late. [So I said], ‘It’s not the end of the world guys, we’re just going to get to the hotel a little bit later, we’re going to eat dinner a little bit later, we’re going to make it. We’re going to find the best way to take what we’ve got and be positive about it.” 

Exposing his athletes to cultural experiences where they play has recently become a point of emphasis for Kelley and his teams as well. “We used to go play in different places [and] we’ve been all over,” says the state champion coach. “We’ve been to D.C., we’ve been to L.A., we’ve been to Utah, Kentucky and Texas … and I used to go into those places and we would get off the bus, go to the hotel, do our walkthrough, go to this place, play [the game] and go home. The kids would never know where they were. They wouldn’t know they were in Washington D.C., our nation's capital, they didn’t know we were in L.A., California … They might as well have been in Zimbabwe playing a game.” 

Traveling to Tennessee the night of the interview, Kelley shares the team’s plan for the night, determined to show his athletes a different part of the country. “Tonight, at the risk of getting our kids tired, we’re going to go see Nashville,” adds Kelley firmly. “When they’re done [playing football] and it’s all over with, they’re going to [say], ‘I remember that trip.’ Because they’re not going to remember the play they made in that game. They’re going to remember going on the trip to Nashville … I want kids to have memorable events that help them have good memories about football.”