UA hoops operations guru Lauren Flaum stays calm, delivers as weather impacts road trips

Hurricanes, COVID-19 — you name it. Arizona women’s basketball director of operations Lauren Flaum has tackled it all.

That’s why when the Wildcats faced an ice storm last weekend on their Oregon schools road trip, there wasn’t much worry within the UA camp. Flaum was there. She’d handle it seemingly with ease.

That’s not to say there there wasn’t a lot going on behind the scenes — from early morning calls and texts to figuring out the best options for not only a flight home, but busses and food for the Wildcats’ traveling party of players, coaches and support staff.

All of this extra effort happened in a way that the players didn’t even know what was going on. Some things might have looked a little different and they stayed an extra day in Eugene, but every meal was served and they got to practice and the games on time.

While it’s all in a day’s work — on in this case four days of intense work — for Flaum, it’s also something that for those in her line of work, is somewhat typical.

One of her main concerns was getting to Portland, where the Wildcats caught their charter flight out on Monday, because the runway in the Eugene airport wasn’t open.

And then, of course, it was finding food for everyone.

“Everything was closed so breakfast on Monday was my bigger concern. Getting the kids fed was my bigger concern than the flight out of Portland,” Flaum said with a laugh.

“The hotel had no food and no help. I found a Whole Foods that was open and I ended up renting a car. Initially, some of our assistants were supposed to go recruiting, but they weren’t able to make it to Portland to get on flights. We rented a car because we didn’t have a bus on Saturday during the day and we needed to get some stuff at the store.”

And just like that, the Wildcats are back on the road again this week — and back in the Pacific Northwest, no less. Arizona (10-7, 2-3 Pac-12) faces Washington (11-4, 4-3) in Seattle Friday at 8 p.m. Elise Woodward and Alyssa Charlston will have the call on Pac-12 Arizona, while Derrick Palmer’s radio call can be heard on 1290-AM.

The work of a director of basketball operations is never done. After Flaum returned to Tucson late Monday afternoon, her hands were on a little bit of everything including tracking the weather for this weekend’s trip back up north, to getting a waiver to essentially move the players’ day off from this week to the Wildcats’ bye week ahead of UA playing ASU on Sunday, Feb. 4. If they had not been able to count Monday, the travel day, as an off day, the Wildcats would have had fewer days to officially prepare for this weekend’s games.

The weather report for this weekend: Rain in Seattle on Thursday when the Wildcats traveled. A mix of snow and rain and above freezing is expected in Pullman for Sunday’s game against Washington State.

With the not-so-ideal schedule with these back-to-back road trips to the Northwest during the winter, one thought that was floated was why not just stay up there this week after the delay?

In one word: school.

“For student-athletes, school comes first,” Flaum said. “It’s really all about the players and it’s a long time to be on the road (10 days). We didn’t even talk about that. For the best interest of our players both physically, mentally, emotionally to get them back to campus to have a couple of days of normalcy. It was really important to get back here.”

Ice hits

While it may have seemed like everything hit on Sunday morning (including Oregon closing access to the game to fans), Flaum knew there was bad weather coming well before that. On Friday night, right after the UA’s 73-70 loss to Oregon State in double overtime, the team bussed from Corvallis to Eugene.

“Growing up in the Midwest, once it starts freezing rain and the temperature drops, you have a very short period of time with ice; once it starts coming, you’re either there or you’re not,” Flaum said. “I had to tell (UA coach) Adia (Barnes), ‘Adia, I know we just lost in double overtime, but if we are going to make it to Eugene tonight, we have to go.’”

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

The Wildcats arrived in Eugene before it got really bad. Practice wasn’t until 5 p.m. the next day, so for the moment everything was fine. Until it wasn’t.

Early the next morning, Flaum got a call from the bus company that they wouldn’t have a bus that day. Typically, the bus (and driver) stays at the hotel with the team, but there was a big volleyball tournament in Eugene that same weekend. Flaum had asked for a local driver hoping to avoid issues. Unfortunately, that was not the case. A bus was found later and took them to practice at 4 p.m.

A little later that morning as the storm was getting worse, everything was starting to close — even deliveries weren’t being made.

This is when Flaum went into action. She secured rooms at the hotel for Sunday night in case they needed to stay an extra night. P.F. Changs wouldn’t be able to deliver the post-game meal and most likely wouldn’t even be open on Sunday. Arizona ended up going to a Texas Roadhouse that was close to the arena for that meal. Then, they ended up eating dinner — pizza, salads, burgers, pasta — about 8 p.m. at the hotel as Cal men’s basketball, who had played Oregon on Saturday night and couldn’t get out of town, was able to sneak in and get dinner first.

Flaum also kept checking with the bus and charter companies as the plan kept shifting. The runway at the Eugene airport was supposed to open at noon on Sunday and thus would be ready in time for the Wildcats after the game. But then at 3 a.m. Sunday morning, Flaum received a text that the runway wouldn’t be open until much later in the afternoon. (The airport didn’t end up opening until Wednesday afternoon.)

Flaum was working on backup plans to the backup plans. The next question was could the bus company drive them to Portland after the game?

“The local person at the bus company told me, ‘If they were my kids, I would not put them on a bus for Eugene to Portland right now. It’s too dangerous,’” Flaum said.

As it was, when the Wildcats did take the bus to Portland late Monday morning, Flaum said there were at least 30 cars pulled to the side of the road and 25 trucks that were jack-knifed.

For Flaum it’s all about being patient, positive, communicating and developing relationships.

“It’s not the first time I’ve had to handle something like this. I was joking around with one of my old bosses. We lived in Birmingham, Alabama, for almost a month with our whole team and athletic department after a hurricane. So, I can survive one day in a snowstorm or ice storm,” Flaum said. “I try to make sure everything I can control is done perfectly, because there’s so much that’s out of our control and I think the biggest thing is just not letting it be a distraction to the team.”

Rim Shot

At the same time all of the UA’s issues were happening in Eugene, Arizona State was facing similar things an hour north in Corvallis. From finding food options to the power going off in the Sun Devils’ hotel. ASU director of operations, Carter Caplan, started working on contingent plans just in case they needed a place to stay. Fortunately, the power came back on.

Caplan shared that the Pac-12 women’s basketball directors of operations have a text chain to help in these and other situations that arise — everything from good restaurants or hotels that can handle large groups to even possibly the ASU team staying in Oregon State’s dorms the night the power went out.

He also had a conversation with the ASU coach, Natasha Adair, after the game, telling her they had to get on the road quickly. The Sun Devils made their commercial flight at the Portland airport just in the nick of time and got home late Sunday night.

“Weather is weather and I can’t control it and everyone knows that we can’t control it. We’ve just got to roll with the punches,” Caplan said.