A logistical challenge: How ASU's equipment team gets Sun Devils to road games

In the middle of Arizona State University’s football equipment room sits a trunk with a unique name.

The “oh crap” trunk, as head football equipment manager Bryan Harrod calls it, is for all the items that for whatever reason didn’t make it into the Dircks Moving and Logistics truck that hauls ASU’s gear to that week’s away game.

It could be a pair of cleats a player forgot to pack. Or a lucky shirt. Or, if ASU’s opponent that week serves Coke products, a coach might request some bottles of Mountain Dew.

Essentially, any item that slips through the cracks goes into the trunk, which is loaded into the cargo hold of the team’s chartered flight.

The trunk speaks to the massive lift ASU’s equipment team — composed of Harrod, football equipment manager Arthur Heuzard and eight students — undertakes each week of a road game.

It’s a task so detailed that even when Harrod and Heuzard sat down on the plane that departed Friday for Waco, Texas — site of Saturday’s game against Baylor University — it was difficult for them not to think about what might have been left behind.

Oh, and about those anxiety dreams …

“I’ve had a few nightmares where you go into the locker room and everything’s gone,” Harrod said. “I had a nightmare one time where we went to set everything up, opened up all the trunks and they were full of beer.”

You might say the Sun Devil is in the details when it comes to getting ASU’s football team to a road game. In all, 212 people are involved, including players and coaches, 10 equipment staff, 10 sports medicine trainers, two truck drivers, 15 people on the ground for departure, five bus drivers and seven security screeners.

And it all starts with the truck.

For Matt Dircks, the president and CEO of Dircks Moving and Logistics, the company’s partnership with ASU is more about family than it is about business.

His father and uncle, who started the company, went to ASU. Matt Dircks is the ninth member of his family to graduate from ASU, the ties going back so far that Dircks said his grandfather had tickets to men’s basketball games at PE West.

“Our blood is maroon and gold,” Dircks said. “We couldn’t always give back to the program in dollars and cents, but how else can we help? How else can we assist? We try to give back in any way we can.”

By Sunday evening of road-game weeks, the 53-foot Dircks trailer that carries anywhere from 25,000 to 35,000 pounds of equipment is parked just outside the football facility.

Awaiting the truck are Harrod and Heuzard. Their preparation for ASU’s trip to Baylor began on Saturday night, as soon as the Sun Devils’ victory over Texas State had concluded. 

While the coaching staff and players celebrate the win, the equipment team goes to work, gathering jerseys, pants, coaches’ gear and more. They spend about two hours taking decals off, storing items and beginning the process of washing and drying everything, and then return to work at about 10 a.m. on Sunday to finish the laundry.

Each week, Heuzard said, they wash more than 100 jerseys.

The packing begins Sunday night. The coaches’ headset system is the first item in because it isn’t needed for the team’s practices during the week. Then the extra gear trunk follows. It’s called that because, well, it holds extra gear like tights, socks, gloves and, for the coaches, polos, slacks, shoes, belts, hats, etc.

The list of items Harrod and Heuzard have to pack is so long they use an iPad checklist to ensure that the items that are supposed to get somewhere actually get there.

There’s rain gear and 14 chairs and kicking nets and a whiteboard. There’s an extension cord trunk, a locker room speaker, hurdles, bikes and hotel stretch bags. There’s a nutrition trunk, a massage table, a sideline table, a stationary bike, a tablet case, backup game jerseys, backup staff shoes, pants, cleats, helmets … By the time they’re done, the 53-foot trailer is packed from end to end and top to bottom.

“It literally takes us 40 to 60, sometimes 70 hours during the week to get everything ready to go,” Harrod said.

And that’s just half the operation.

The truck has to be at the road-game site by Friday for unloading. Which means when ASU is traveling to places like Waco — more than 1,000 miles from Tempe — the truck has to leave by Wednesday.

The longer commute means Dircks has to provide two drivers — the husband-and-wife team of Christian and Rosa Mayo, each pulling an eight-hour shift while the other sleeps. When the truck is parked at a hotel overnight, the drivers make sure it is parked in a place where staff behind the front desk can see it and possibly prevent any break-ins.

“There could be some ne'er-do-wells who see an equipment truck and say, ‘Hey, there’s some gear I can grab from there,’” Harrod said.

Once ASU’s traveling party reaches the team hotel, the equipment staff goes to the stadium and starts the process of unloading, putting jerseys on shoulder pads and setting up the locker room.

On game days, they arrive at the stadium six hours before the game to set up the sideline and make sure everything is ready to go. Then staff gets to relax and watch the first half of the game, but at halftime they start loading the truck with items they won’t need, like rain gear. Then, they have one hour after the game to load everything for the ride back home.

“It’s very stressful,” Heuzard said. “You can’t leave anything behind. There have been a couple of times where we’ve had to ask the truck drivers to pack the last few trunks because the (team) buses were leaving for the airport.”

Getting ASU’s football team from Tempe to Waco or Iowa State and back isn’t glamorous. It’s behind-the-scenes, crossing-off-the-checklist, rinse-and-repeat work.

But the man in charge of the Sun Devils’ football program has a great appreciation for what the equipment team does.

“They do an unbelievable job,” coach Kenny Dillingham said. “It’s a thankless job sometimes, but they’re a big part of the team. We need them to be successful.

“They deal with our players every single day. They’re here in the mornings when I get here. They just do an unbelievable job of getting our guys ready.”