Leonard Hamilton making no excuses ahead of cross-country ACC trip

The Florida State Seminoles are preparing for a road trip to California to take on the ACC’s new California schools. Despite that long travel schedule, Seminoles head coach Leonard Hamilton isn’t making any excuses.

This comes in the first season where Stanford and Cal are members of the ACC, making for consistently difficult road trips in the conference. Still, Hamilton knows that the Seminoles need to go out there regardless of the challenge.

“Those of you who know we, we got to make it,” Leonard Hamilton said. “We’ve got to do it. I can complain. I can point out how tough it’s gonna be. We’re going commercial. We charter all the time. I could complain about a lot of stuff, but at the end of the day, we’ve got to go play those games. Most importantly, we’ve got to go win them. We want to go and come back with two victories and you’ve got to take them one at a time.”

With Stanford and Cal now being in the ACC, those two schools both need to take cross-country trips while teams take those long trips to them as well. Notably, in the case of Stanford, the Cardinal are 1-4 in road games in the ACC but 2-0 in home games. Cal, for its part, is 1-2 in home games in ACC play but 1-3 in road games. Those records include Stanford’s road win at Cal and are still relatively small sample sizes.

“So, whatever, however tough it is, everyone else has to go out there too,” Hamilton said. “So, the way I figure, let’s just go on with it. Let’s see if we make the best of it as opposed to thinking about the challenges I want to think about [how] spending that much time together will allow us to bond more, get better acquainted with each other, and help us grow as a team in our brotherhood.”

Before becoming the head coach at Florida State, Leonard Hamilton was the head coach of the Washington Wizards. The NBA has more travel like this stretch of games, including jumping time zones, which does give the coaching staff some ability to lean on experience for this road trip.

“I think some of that’s important. That’s why I don’t particularly like going to Hawaii to play in those tournaments. You go over there, the jet lag sometimes will affect you, but we’re leaving on Monday, play on Wednesday, play on Saturday. I [don’t] want to even think about anything that could be challenging. We just want to figure out when we’ll get to that game that we have. If I’m ahead by a half a point in each game, I’ll be a happy camper,” Hamilton said.

“So, I’m not overly concerned about it. I’ve been doing this a long time. We will adjust. Practice at the right time and try to get our kids ready, rested, hydrated, and stretched. So, we’ll do everything we can but at the end of the day when they throw that ball up, we’ve got to be ready to play.”

Florida State will start its road trip against Cal on Wednesday night before finishing up against Stanford on Saturday. Neither of the California teams is scheduled to travel to Tallahassee this season.