The timer on Sebastian Hernandez’s watch sounded Monday afternoon somewhere over Kansas, Missouri or Arkansas. That familiar ding meant it was exactly three hours into a cross-country flight for the Cal men’s basketball team, at the tail end of its first season as a member of the ACC.
Just as he’d done during the team’s three previous five-to-six-hour flights that hop three time zones, Cal’s athletic performance coach asked the flight crew to flick on the cabin lights. Coaches were already awake ready to dissect film of their next opponent. Hernandez walked the aisle, ensuring players didn’t drift off. He told them to swig the large bottles of SmartWater filled with electrolytes and handed out snacks.
It was time to get up.
Cruising above 30,000 feet, time can both be a blur and of the essence.
The objective seems simple: Keep your body’s schedule on its own time zone. Make it as if you never left the Bay Area. It’s the best way to keep the Bears feeling fresh and competitive as they explore their new league, which has demanded a new level of travel during a 20-game ACC season that has taken them to Atlanta and Pittsburgh and Raleigh, N.C.
Cal, along with nearby rival Stanford, joined the far-flung ACC to keep a place among the power conferences after the dissolution of the Pac-12, knowing full well jet lag would be among the consequences.
“The price to play in the conference for us? It’s tough. It’s heavy,” Cal second-year coach Mark Madsen said. “It’s hard on the body. But we’re doing the very best that we can because we love being in the conference.”
The Bears (13-17 overall, 6-13 in ACC play) close out their regular season Saturday afternoon at Notre Dame. The ACC tournament starts Tuesday in Charlotte, N.C.
It was last summer when Madsen, pen in one hand, notepad balanced on his knee, learned the ins and outs of circadian rhythm, the body’s innate 24-hour cycle. Members of the Cal athletic department listened intently to a sleep expert’s presentation on combating significant travel stress on the body.
Madsen knew that this season could demand as many as five trips to the Eastern time zone, and he wanted to utilize all possible avenues to prepare for long flights, practices that start before the sun rises, and hard-to-implement bedtime routines.
A sleep expert who has worked at NASA to help astronauts prepare for space travel would fit the bill.
He had to look no further than the guy making the presentation.
Dr. Alan Kubey is a dyed-in-the-wool Cal Bear, a former Cal Mic Man, one of the school’s primary superfans at sporting events. He’d sport a gold and blue polo shirt on football Saturdays during the program’s heyday, featuring Marshawn Lynch and Aaron Rodgers. He went on to spend seven years working as a sleep consultant for NASA, helping astronauts understand the importance of prioritizing sticking to a circadian rhythm for optimal performance.
Kubey spent time at the Johnson Space Center in Houston when he worked on designing lights for the International Space Station and educating astronauts on the importance of sleep.
He’s had studies published on sleep deficiency in astronauts traveling both to outer space and in the months prior to launch and helped astronauts prepare their circadian rhythm for long trips to Kazakhstan, where launches to the space station routinely take place.
A physics major at Cal who later pulled double duty at NASA while also attending medical school in Philadelphia, Kubey said he found a connection with NASA engineers and physiologists when it came to the science of sleep.
Kubey said there was a trope used among engineers that astronauts were often the root of the problem in training exercises, not the machinery itself. They called the astronauts “squishy pink things.” The physiologists would quickly point out that the whole point of the machinery was for the benefit of the “squishy pink things” to safely explore the galaxy.
“That has stuck with me,” Kubey said. “I used to be a mind over matter guy but have since realized to optimize performance, we have to remember we are all squishy pink things. We have to remember to acknowledge, embrace and engage our physiology — both its strengths and its weaknesses — to optimize our performance in whatever venue that might be. That is what makes this so fun and interesting.”
Kubey is now a hospitalist at both Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.
Kubey’s presentation to all Cal athletic staffers last summer opened the eyes of not only Madsen, but many coaches, trainers and administrators. These presentations have, at times, the ability to become, well, snoozers. This one was the opposite, Kubey said. Madsen and Cal women’s basketball coach Charmin Smith dominated the Q&A portion looking for any way to adjust optimally.
“We had concerns of course,” Hernandez said of initially following Kubey’s suggested travel outline, “but we were also excited for the challenge of trying to find an edge, and maximizing the circumstances was a motivating factor for us.”
And for the past nine months, Kubey has been an invaluable resource to any Cal staffer with a question. Hernandez said there were countless rough drafts in the fall floated back and forth between programs and Kubey to enhance what these week-long trips that always feature two road games would look like.
“Anyone can call or text him,” Cal associate athletic director Josh Hummel said. “And they do.”
Prioritizing the body’s circadian shift across several time zones, Kubey said, allows it to stay on a familiar pattern. Disruptions cause the body to feel more lethargic on game days or throw off sleep patterns that lead to likely performance drop-offs. During Cal’s East Coast swings so far this year, the Bears leave two days before their first road game of the week which typically comes on Wednesdays. Around 11 a.m. to noon on Monday, Cal’s charter flight will take off from Oakland International Airport bound for Chapel Hill or Pittsburgh or Louisville.
“If you isolate physical performance, and this has been studied, the performance difference can go as high as 10 to 20 percent from your low to your high,” Kubey said. “That’s often comparing the middle of the night to your peak, which isn’t a fair comparison, but if you can imagine in games of inches, if you can get a few percentage points difference on peak speed or peak alertness, in a tight game, that may be part of the sauce to squeak out that road win.”
The Cal women’s basketball team is having its best year since 2014-15 having won 25 games in Year 1 in the ACC and went 3-5 in Eastern time.
“I think it really helps with the mental part of things,” Smith said. “Having a plan and having something that we can show as a justification as to why we’re telling our players to go to bed or wake up at certain times or to not look at their phones or eat at certain times or nap at certain times. We can back all that up.”
Thanks to Kubey’s outlines, Hernandez plans in-flight naps depending on the travel destination. The body is ready for a nap or sleep anywhere from five to eight hours after waking up. After a 6 a.m. Monday morning practice before a trip East, players will naturally be ready for a nap around the time the flight leaves Oakland. Once the wheels touch down around 8 or 9 p.m. ET, it’s not time to decompress at the team hotel.
It’s time for impromptu film sessions. Or a walk-through in hotel ballrooms. To secure the positive impacts of the circadian shift, players do not prepare for sleep that night until at least 1 a.m. ET. Players are allowed to sleep until as late as 11 a.m. the following morning to stay on schedule and are encouraged to walk outside the hotel to catch sunlight. The body registering sun is, as Kubey explained, one of the most pertinent factors to avoiding jet lag as it resets your body’s internal clock.
The coaches, meanwhile, do not follow the same meticulous routine and are typically up and eagerly waiting to get the day underway as players sleep in.
For the second leg of these long road trips — from either Pittsburgh to Clemson or Durham to Atlanta — Hernandez said they gradually shift time zones by 30 to 60 minutes each day depending on the start time of those weekend tipoffs. Wake-up times are sliced down from 11 a.m. Wednesday to 10:30 a.m. Thursday to 10 a.m. Friday and then as early as 9:30 a.m. Saturday for a potential shootaround that morning.
Madsen won two NBA titles with the Los Angeles Lakers playing alongside Hall of Famers like Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. He is no stranger to road trips — East Coast swings in the NBA for a West Coast team last anywhere from five to 10 days. A week on the road for college athletes at an elite academic university who have class to attend has changed Madsen’s stance on his typical intense practices he wants as a feature of the program.
And Cal has to stay flexible — and patient. After Cal’s 80-68 loss at Clemson on Saturday, Jan. 4, the charter flight was slated to leave around midnight from South Carolina, but a mechanical issue forced a three-hour delay. The Bears didn’t get back until Sunday at 6 a.m. PT.
It is a byproduct of the times, Madsen said. And he’s not asking for pity.
The Bears are 1-7 back east this year but still managed to squeeze into the ACC tournament as the 15th and final team in the 18-team league. Madsen is utilizing this new reality to introduce to supporters of Cal athletics what it’s like to be behind the scenes for lengthy road trips. Madsen saved 20 seats on the team’s charter for the Feb. 12 trip to No. 3 Duke for prominent alumni to capture the demands of what his Bears have in front of them and plans on continuing the practice.
He was also reminded of those demands every Monday when the ACC hosts a head coach’s conference call to discuss the week ahead. Madsen likes to listen sometimes just out of curiosity. Coaches bound for the Bay Area for the Cal-Stanford swing are asked by media members how they’ll manage the arduous travel.
“I laugh every single time,” Madsen said, “because I want to just tell them, ‘Guess what, guys? We’re always going the other way.”
(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Photos courtesy of CK Hicks/Cal Athletics)
