Hoops, hangars and holding patterns. Inside Clemson basketball’s trip to NYC
Seven hours before Clemson men’s basketball played BYU in the Jimmy V Classic on Tuesday, Andy Assaley stood inside Madison Square Garden, shaking his head.
“You jinxed me,” he said, laughing.
The previous morning, Assaley, Clemson’s director of men’s basketball operations, was on the phone with The State, running through the Tigers’ logistical game plan for a midweek trip to The World’s Most Famous Arena. Getting up to New York City for a Tuesday game during finals week hadn’t been the easiest task, but Clemson had a great plan, he said. Everything was set, booked, finalized.
“New York traffic is New York traffic,” Assaley said Monday. “That’s the one thing.”
Traffic was the last thing on Assaley’s mind later that evening as he floated between the cockpit of Clemson’s team plane and the cabin, communicating by-the-minute updates and trying to figure out how the heck the Tigers were going to make it to NYC on Monday night after the nearby New Jersey airport they’d planned to fly into for months suddenly had a full runway and no space for them to land.
Clemson’s traveling party was never in danger at any point during its roundabout flight to NYC. But the fact they reached their midtown Manhattan hotel around 9 p.m. Monday anyway, with enough time for a few players to knock out online final exams? That was a logistical miracle — and, if it weren’t for a social media post from Clemson’s athletic director, may have gone completely unnoticed.
Welcome to life as a director of basketball operations — or a “DBOP,” as many in college basketball affectionately call a role that covers just about everything.
Clemson basketball and Assaley gave The State an inside look at their day-to-day schedule before, during and after the Jimmy V Classic to illustrate what goes into pulling off travel and logistics for a marquee game like Tuesday’s.
The answer? A lot.
Plan in advance, react in the moment
The trouble started around 4:30 p.m. Monday.
Assaley has been doing this long enough to know you don’t leave anything up to chance. He worked for Frank Martin at Kansas State and South Carolina and has been Brad Brownell’s DBOP since 2022. He’s helped coordinate dozens of complex, quick-turnaround road trips: Big 12, SEC, ACC, NCAA Tournament, you name it.
Clemson officially announced it would play in the Jimmy V Classic in early June, but the school knew about the game in the spring. By summer, Assaley was just waiting on an official game date to finalize a charter flight with the team’s usual provider, Champion Air LLC, as well as New York bus and hotel reservations.
Clemson practiced as scheduled at Littlejohn Coliseum early Monday afternoon and bused roughly 35 minutes from campus to Anderson Regional Airport in Upstate South Carolina, their usual pick-up spot. Their plane, an Embraer brand twin-engine jet that seats 50 people, took off at 3:28 p.m.
About 90 minutes into the trip, though, the pilots got word from Teterboro, New Jersey Airport, where they were supposed to land, that its runway was at capacity, and they couldn’t accommodate Clemson’s flight, which they’d marked down as arriving four hours later that night.
That came as a surprise to Clemson staff, considering the basketball team’s charter flight had been on the books for months. Changing plans wasn’t easy. Given New York City’s massive population, there are various restrictions on private and charter flight usage at major airports. Most land well outside the city limits, including in Tetersboro, which is about 12.5 miles (and 50 minutes) east of Manhattan.
And it’s not like they could take an Uber XL. Shifting airports could mean shifting travel plans and finding either a different bus and driver or a different bus company to get a traveling party of about 50 people to the Big Apple.
And then there was the issue of fuel …
About two hours after Clemson initially scrapped its months-long travel, Brownell plopped an orange traffic cone down on the cement floor of an airport hangar — in Easton, Maryland, 350 miles south of New York City.
“OK,” Clemson basketball’s coach told his team. “Pretend this is the basket.”
New team walkthrough location: An airport hangar
Assaley spent hours coordinating with athletic leadership to determine how Clemson basketball would make a midweek trip to NYC while also properly accounting for players’ fall semester final exams, which ran Dec. 8-12.
That included Leslie Moreland-Bishop, the team’s academic advisor, traveling with the team so she could proctor/supervise players’ online finals at the team hotel.
So forgive Assaley for not hammering out the finer details of what initially went down Monday night: Clemson players — who were supposed to be at their hotel by now — standing around in puffer jackets and sweats around 7 p.m. as Brownell ran through Tuesday’s game plan next to a helicopter in a gray, semi-lit airport hangar.
It was a new level of “Clemson Grit,” athletic director Graham Neff joked on X.
The impromptu walkthrough was a bizarre scene with an understandable backstory: Once Clemson’s plane was told it couldn’t land in Teterboro, New Jersey, it made an in-air U-turn and started flying loops around the Washington, D.C., area at 33,000 feet, trying to find another New York-area airport where it could touch down, or, at worst, a mid-point airport to land and wait out an opening.
The pilots kept striking out. They were going to land in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Then Newark, New Jersey. Then north Philadelphia. They kept circling.
Clemson’s lead pilot, who’d been flying planes for over 40 years, said he’d never experienced such a holding pattern for a pre-planned charter in his career (teams specifically take private flights instead of commercial to avoid delays). Eventually, they locked in on Trenton, New Jersey as a landing spot — but the pilots were concerned about having enough fuel to get there after almost two hours in the air.
So they landed in Easton, Maryland to refuel as a precautionary measure.
The pilots had Assaley get on the intercom and serve as a quasi-flight attendant, breaking down the new plan to an understandably confused team.
One positive from the detour, on top of the fact they landed safely?
Clemson center Trent Steinour found a piano inside the hangar and revealed he’s pretty skilled on the keys, nailing a rendition of John Newman’s “Love Me Again.”
Then it was back on the plane to fly to Trenton, New Jersey, where they would catch a bus to Manhattan and their team hotel.
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Crushing losses and quick turnarounds
Coaches often talk about having a “next-game mentality.”
On Tuesday night, Clemson basketball didn’t have a choice.
The Tigers led No. 10 BYU by 22 points early in the second half of their Jimmy V Classic game before collapsing down the stretch, losing their lead, somehow tying the game back up at 64-64 with 5.5 seconds on two tough shots from guard Dillon Hunter and ultimately losing 67-64 on a deep, buzzer-beating 3-pointer.
Their reward was a roughly 70-mile, 90-minute bus ride from Madison Square Garden to Trenton, New Jersey, where their charter plane back to South Carolina was waiting.
The program certainly felt the gravity of the moment — Tuesday was Clemson’s first time playing in the Jimmy V Classic since 1997 and first ever regular-season game at Madison Square Garden. But there was no sightseeing, no team excursions.
They were either playing, practicing or inside their team hotel, the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, which provided all of Clemson’s meals and meeting spaces.
“It was absolutely a business trip,” Assaley said.
Because of Monday’s travel delay, Clemson basketball spent just over 24 hours in New York City. The Clemson-BYU game ended at 9:04 p.m, and the team was out of its locker room and out the door about 30 minutes later. The Tigers left the Trenton, New Jersey airport at 11:40 p.m. — three minutes before the second game of Tuesday’s Jimmy V double-header, Florida vs. UConn, went final at MSG.
Clemson’s flight landed at the Anderson airport at 1:09 a.m. Wednesday, and the team arrived at Littlejohn Coliseum around 1:30 a.m. On Wednesday afternoon, Clemson players took additional final exams. Brownell and his coaching staff watched Tuesday film and started prep for Saturday’s home game vs. Mercer.
And Assaley, after a job well done, started thinking about the next road trip.
This story was originally published December 12, 2025 at 8:00 AM with the headline "Hoops, hangars and holding patterns. Inside Clemson basketball’s trip to NYC."
