In some ways, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's football game at Western Kentucky on Saturday afternoon will feel a lot like the 46 years worth of Mocs road trips that have come and gone before it for Mike Royster.
The 71-year-old assistant athletic director for equipment and facilities will board one of the school's two 48-foot equipment trucks at 7 o'clock Friday morning and head toward Bowling Green, Kentucky. Not that he'll go far before he and his crew of equipment managers and other personnel stop for a hearty breakfast at a Cracker Barrel.
"The Sunrise Sampler," said Royster when asked his breakfast of choice. "Eggs, bacon, hashbrowns, the works. It's the Sampler, after all. It's got everything."
Then it's back in the truck for the remainder of the three-hour ride to the WKU campus and the Hilltoppers' Houchens Industries-L. T. Smith Stadium. It will similarly take them around three hours to prepare the visitors' locker room for the UTC players, hanging helmets and shoulder pads and other equipment at each locker. They'll also make their way to the visiting coaches room inside the press box to assemble and test the headset equipment that connects the coaches in the box to those on the sideline, as well as other duties.
And once the 4 p.m. (EDT) game comes to an end, all that equipment has to be packed back up and hauled home on the same two trucks that brought it there, then unloaded and returned to the ground floor of McKenzie Arena to be washed, folded and readied for, uh...
"Next year," said Royster.
Welcome to UTC's football opener and finale, all in the same day.
Or as second-year Mocs coach Rusty Wright said Tuesday, "It's unique, but the whole year's been unique."
Among UTC athletic department employees almost no one is as unique, beloved, and quite possibly irreplaceable as Royster, who arrived on campus in the summer of 1974 from Saint Andrews-Sewanee prep school to work under football coach Joe Morrison, the former New York Giants playing great.
Forty-seven football autumns later, he's still there, nearly as big a part of Mocs athletic history to those close to the program as Scrappy Moore, the Sweet 16, Gordon and Golden, JoMo or TO.
In a nod to a simpler, sweeter time that only older folks or golf course maintenance workers can likely appreciate, when Royster was asked what he's most missed from his earliest days in the business, he said, "You could go down to practice in the morning and smell the cut grass. It was a great place to be."
Too much of the grass in too many locales is plastic now, including UTC's Finley Stadium. But Royster and his closest traveling companions are real, though far from green.
There's longtime campus electrician Kyle Askew, who, in Royster's words, "Just knows how stuff works."
There's Jim Weddington, who Royster says, "Can fix anything."
Then there's Frank "Bubba" Trundle Jr.
"We were on the road one time and someone from the other team was watching us set up and pointed to Bubba and asked 'Who's that?'" recalled Royster. "I told them that's our team dentist. The guy looks at me and says, 'Dentist? That's the hardest worker you've got!'"
But it's Royster who's made it work all these years, who's mentored some of the best equipment guys in the business, such as the University of South Carolina's Chris Matlock, or the late, great Phil Hibdon of Baylor School fame.
The latest in that long line may be Royster's current assistant Billy Wilson.
Asked when he'd finally exit McKenzie Arena after the Mocs' return from Bowling Green, Wilson replied, "About 3:30 or 4 in the morning."
Royster leaned back in his office chair on Tuesday afternoon and grinned as he recalled two of the more humorous moments he could repeat in a family newspaper from 46 football seasons worth of road trips.
"We were in Charleston, S.C., a long time ago, though not so long that it doesn't involve a cell phone," remembered Royster, "and we were eating breakfast at a Cracker Barrel when one of the equipment managers who'd decided to sleep a little later at the hotel calls me to tell me that the keys to the equipment truck are locked inside it.
"'But that's not the worst part,' he tells me. 'The engine's running.' Fortunately, a woman who worked at the hotel convinced AAA that she'd done it and they got the truck open in about a minute."
Then there was last year, the day before the Tennessee game in Knoxville. The Mocs had one equipment truck then. And when Royster drove on the scales at the weigh-in station just south of Volsville, the truck was too heavy.
"They impounded it until we could get another truck there and lighten the load," he said. "So now we take two equipment trucks."
Before the coronavirus pandemic altered all our lives, before it had played havoc with UTC's athletic budget and all but erased this Mocs football season, Royster had considered retiring at the end of this school year.
Now?
"I don't want to go out on a season that's not a season," he said.
It may be the only good thing to come from COVID-19.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com