Waukesha West Football Discovers New Conference Rivals Live 90+ Miles Away

WAUKESHA — Waukesha West High School's football program has completed its long-anticipated move into the North Shore Conference, a realignment that athletic director Tom Krause said brings "a great group of competitive programs" and, as of last week's schedule review, a great deal of Wisconsin highway.

Krause and his coaching staff spent Tuesday afternoon plotting this fall's away games on a printed state map pinned to a whiteboard in the athletic office, a process Krause described as "informative" and assistant coach Marcus Chen, 38, described as "sobering." The farthest opponent venue, identified after some debate over whether to measure from the school or from the stadium parking lot, came out to 94 miles door to door.

To make a 7 p.m. kickoff at that distance, the staff calculated that the team bus needs to leave the West parking lot no later than 2 p.m. on game day, accounting for a fueling stop, a bathroom stop, and what Krause called "a standard 20-minute buffer for anything involving Highway 41 construction."

The Parking Lot Plan

Chen, who is in his third year on staff and volunteered to run the initial mileage calculations, told the group during Tuesday's meeting that the team should "just stay on the bus between games and hold all four practices in the parking lot," a suggestion Krause said was delivered "with a straight face" and has since been repeated at two subsequent staff meetings, unprompted, by three different assistant coaches.

"Just stay on the bus between games and hold all four practices in the parking lot."

— Marcus Chen, assistant coach

The district's current transportation contract books buses on a per-trip basis through a regional charter company, a system Krause said has worked fine for a conference schedule where the longest previous road trip ran 22 miles. Under the new North Shore alignment, West's away schedule includes three venues over 60 miles and two others that Krause's map places "functionally near Illinois."

Krause said the athletic department is now evaluating whether to negotiate a season-long charter arrangement with a single bus and driver rather than booking each trip individually, a change he estimated could save the district "some amount of money, on paper, assuming nothing goes wrong in October."

Practical Matters

The travel questions extend beyond the bus itself. Head coach Dennis Fahey said the team is revisiting its pregame meal schedule, since a 2 p.m. departure pushes what has traditionally been a sit-down team dinner into a to-go arrangement eaten somewhere along Highway 41. "We're looking at sandwiches," Fahey said. "Structured sandwiches. Not just whatever's available at a gas station, though that remains the backup plan."

Krause noted that West's equipment manager has already flagged concerns about ice supply for away games beyond a two-hour drive, and that the training staff is drafting a revised protocol for what to do if a player needs treatment more than 90 minutes from the school's athletic trainer, who does not currently travel to all away games.

Asked whether any of this had been anticipated when the school applied to join the North Shore Conference last year, Krause said the geography "came up in conversation" during the application process but that the conference's competitive level was considered the deciding factor. "We knew some trips would be longer," Krause said. "I don't know that anyone had run the actual numbers."

A Familiar Feeling

The travel logistics have prompted comparisons around the athletic office to the school's other long-running navigation problem: the East Avenue roundabout, which opened downtown to general confusion and remains, by informal city consensus, unconquered. Chen, who commutes through the roundabout twice daily, said he has started thinking of the North Shore road trips as "the roundabout, but for three hours instead of forty seconds."

Krause said the department plans to finalize its transportation arrangement before the first road game in September, and that parents have been notified departure times may shift depending on which highway route the bus company's dispatcher recommends that week. "We're building in flexibility," Krause said. "We have to. We don't fully know these roads yet."

The team's first true test of the new schedule comes in Week 3, a trip Krause's whiteboard currently lists at 71 miles, with a question mark next to the return time.