It would happen virtually every Monday of the 2024-25 basketball season. At some point during the ACC’s weekly coaches conference call, someone would inevitably be asked about the challenges associated with traveling to California to play the league’s new West Coast members.
Cal’s Mark Madsen, listening in while waiting for his own 10-minute session with the media, would always chuckle when it happened. “They were always talking about how tough it was to come out here and play,” Madsen tells Hoops HQ. “But they only had to do it once. We were doing it, like, every few weeks.”
Madsen’s Bears made four trips to the Eastern time zone, to be exact, during the final three months of their first regular season in the ACC. It’s a grind that left them physically and mentally exhausted by the time they arrived in Charlotte as the 15th and final seed to qualify for the conference tournament.
To their credit, though, they didn’t go into hibernation quietly. Cal extended Notre Dame to four overtimes before falling 102-100 in their regular-season finale in South Bend before surviving two more extra periods in an upset of 10th-seeded Virginia Tech three days later in their tournament opener. Then, despite missing both ACC Sixth Man of the Year Jeremiah Wilkinson and point guard Jovan Blacksheer Jr. because of injuries, Madsen’s squad took rival Stanford down to the wire in the second round – losing only after a questionable illegal screen call on Mady Sissoko with 6.9 seconds remaining cost them an opportunity to tie.
“We were depleted by injuries and the guys were worn down by all the travel, but I was really proud of the way they held together,” Madsen says. “Even with everything we went through, we felt like we were going to win every time we stepped onto the court.”
Cal traveled a total of 22,691 miles once all was said and done, slightly more than Stanford and the second most nationally behind only former Pac-12 rival Oregon of the Big Ten. That’s not exactly a situation conducive to success, as noted by the Bears’ 6-14 league record (14-19 overall). That includes a 1-7 mark on their Eastern swings.
Still, it’s better than the alternative. Had it not been the lifeline thrown to Cal and Stanford by the ACC after the breakup of the Pac-12, there’s a good chance both might have been left adrift without power-conference affiliation. That’s why Madsen has fully embraced the logistical hoops he’s forced to jump through as coach of a West Coast team in an Atlantic Coast conference. “Is it hard on the body? Yes, it is,” he says. “There’s a price we have to pay to be in this conference. But we love being part of the ACC. So we’re doing everything we can to make it work.”
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Madsen’s team will have a drastically different look when it returns to the court this fall. With Wilkinson having transferred to Georgia, leading scorer Andrej Stojakovic now at Illinois and only three returning scholarship players on the roster, the coach’s chronically painful shoulder wasn’t the only thing in need of offseason surgery.
Among the newcomers are nine incoming transfers – including Hall of Famer Scottie Pippen’s son Justin Pippen (Michigan) and ACC veterans Chris Bell (Syracuse) and Dai Dai Ames (Virginia) – along with a pair of 4-star freshmen. The holdovers are Rytis Petraltis, a versatile 6-foot-7 senior forward, and 6-foot-2 senior guard DJ Campbell, both of whom are returning starters, plus 6-foot-10 senior shot blocker Lee Dort.
Madsen has been impressed with what he’s seen from the group during summer workouts, saying that they have the potential to be a much better shooting team than the one that finished dead last in the ACC at 41.9 percent in 2024-25. He’s also convinced that even with such massive turnover, this group of Bears will benefit from the difficult lessons the previous year’s squad learned.
The two-time NBA champion and his staff spent the summer working with diagnostic professionals both in-house and from outside sources to help their players be better prepared for their upcoming travel schedule. They even heard from a sleep expert who once worked with NASA astronauts to teach them ways to lessen the effects of the travel fatigue commonly known as jet lag.
It’s a plan that includes early morning practices while at home to simulate East Coast starting times, leaving a day earlier to allow more time for recovery from long flights and doing a better job of staying hydrated. This year’s schedule has the Bears making four cross-country trips: to Virginia and Virginia Tech in early January, to Florida State and Miami later that month, to Syracuse and Boston College in mid-February and to Georgia Tech and Wake Forest in the final week of the regular season.
“We’ve had our people looking into all aspects of our travel challenges,” Madsen says. “We’ve made some decisions we think will help us deal with it better than we did last year.”
