Kaiya McCullough held the slip of paper in her hand that every UCLA student-athlete must at the beginning of every academic quarter. From class to class, she bounced around the campus in Westwood, Calif., introducing herself to her instructors, telling them she was a defender for the Bruins women’s soccer team and that from August to probably November, her athletic and academic life would be constantly contradicting one another.

McCullough, the daughter of two former UCLA student-athletes, shares the anecdote often when asked about the challenges of trying to balance a full course load at a renowned university and playing for one of the top college programs. While appearing in 92 matches in her four years for the Bruins, the political science major and the 2019 Pac-12 Scholar Athlete of the Year said she had to alter the focus of her degree because professors wouldn’t allow her to be absent as much as necessary.

It’s already demanding to be a student-athlete. How much harder will life be for those in so-called Olympic or non-revenue sports, long points of pride at USC and UCLA, as they join a conference that stretches coast to coast?

As the aftershocks from UCLA and USC’s tectonic-shifting move to the Big Ten, set to occur in 2024, continue to reverberate throughout college athletics, some University of California regents and former coaches and athletes associated with Olympic sports at the schools question how the move will impact programs that aren’t football, the driving force behind realignment and the league’s new $8 billion TV deal. Does such a financially beneficial move for the two schools belittle what it means to be a student-athlete? University officials have acknowledged the extended travel will pose difficulties.

“As a college athlete, you’re there for an education,” McCullough said. “You need to get your education and your degree, and I really do think there will be some academic outcomes that will be very challenging for players.”

Yeah, @UCLAAthletics has produced some absolute legends. 🤩 pic.twitter.com/hnHu1LvVmX

— Big Ten Network (@BigTenNetwork) July 1, 2022

Will it be as simple as throwing money at the problem to ease the new conference travel schedule that ditches hour-long flights to Eugene, Ore., and Tempe, Ariz., for cross-country treks to Piscataway, N.J., and State College, Pa.? Each Big Ten school is expected to earn an average of $75 million a year under the new media rights deal. If USC and UCLA remained in the Pac-12, their take homes would’ve been significantly less, likely by the tens of millions.

“It’s like the old saying: To make money, you have to spend money,” said Scott Rosner, director of the master of science in sports management program at Columbia University. “And they’re going to be making a lot more money.”

The Pac-12 — and the Pac-10 before it — routinely marketed itself as “the conference of champions,” most often pointing to the pipeline of Olympic athletes churned out. At the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo, USC and UCLA combined to have 115 current or former student-athletes as participants.

In the Big Ten, which sent 155 athletes to the Tokyo Games, it is unclear whether UCLA or USC will charter flights for all programs now making a much farther trek east. But missed class time, elongated travel days and the difficulties associated with rest and recovery on long flights are among the chief topics of concern.

Former USC women’s soccer coach Keidane McAlpine, now the head coach at Georgia, was, like most everyone else, stunned when he heard the news. McAlpine led the Trojans to eight NCAA Tournament appearances during his time in Los Angeles, including a national title in 2016.

“How to manage that, the class time, the recovery, providing them an opportunity to be at their very best, I’m glad I’m not in it,” he said. “I’m happy I’m in the SEC, where we do have the ability to charter flights and have some shorter flights and have the ability to, from an academic standpoint, put our women in a situation where they can get all of the things they need. And athletically, to be able to recover.”

NCAA rules mandate a maximum of 20 hours per week for required athletic activities, but that excludes travel.

“One of the rubs that I could see, especially having come from a public school, is professors don’t have to allow online learning,” said former UCLA gymnastics coach Valorie Kondos Field, who led the Bruins to seven national titles. “That was the one thing: What’s the rub going to be between university athletics and professors?”

Many sports traditionally in the Pac-12 have travel partner locations, which allow a school to fly into one location and play two schools, with a bus ride in between, such as the four-plus hour drive from Washington to Washington State. According to a 17-page report produced for the UC regents to assess the move, that would continue in the Big Ten, although flights might be needed between the competitions in some cases because the distances between the sites are greater.

A flight from LAX to Newark is at least five hours. Ditto for a flight to Baltimore. That’s only if they’re booked on direct flights. And what about getting to more remote locales, like Penn State? A chartered flight could get teams to University Park Airport in State College, which might be a necessity for the L.A. schools, otherwise a near-two-hour bus ride would be added to a long flight to Harrisburg.

“Any normal human being, when they fly, they’re swelling, and the recovery time is going to be longer,” Kondos Field said. “(A chartered flight) does improve the sell, and I hope the money is used for that for all sports — not just a handful. It’s still time in the air.”

McAlpine said keeping teams on a fair playing field will also need to be taken into account.

“Let’s say you’re going to play Penn State at Penn State three time zones away and you come back to L.A. to play Iowa, who was at home on the weekend, and they’re taking their one flight,” McAlpine  said. “There’s a lot of logistics.”

McCullough recalls when having TSA PreCheck at LAX was the highlight of a travel day. Otherwise, it was cramming into middle seats, dealing with flight delays and being overall groggy on campus after returning from a three-to-four-day trip. And that was just a jaunt to the Northwest or the Bay Area.

“It’s just a tremendous ask of athletes to sacrifice their body more than they already are for their sports and for the sake of the school. I have real problems with this,” she said. “It solidifies what I’ve been telling people for a while now that these schools don’t have their athletes’ best interests in mind all the time.”

One conference source anticipated that USC and UCLA student-athletes will travel 159 percent more air miles and 44 percent more bus miles in the Big Ten, adding that even if sports are able to charter, travel times will at least double. The Bruins spend $8 million a year on travel and game expenses for their athletic programs, according to financial information reported to the NCAA. That could explode if UCLA charters half the time, costing as much as $13.1 million and more than doubling if every sport charters with an estimated cost of $23.7 million, according to the conference source.

“Gross is different from net. I think that needs to be kept in consideration. When you see what the schools are going to be making X-amount more, it’s really X-minus these additional travel costs,” Rosner said. “The increase is going to be substantial. Let’s not be naive about this. It’s going to be substantial. It’s just the tradeoff in revenue is going to be so much higher that it’s worth taking on the additional expense.”

While USC is a private university, UCLA’s move has come under public scrutiny and was the focus last week of a board of regents meeting, during which the initial findings of the report, compiled by the UC system office of the president, were also presented.

The Bruins have 25 teams with 686 student-athletes. Of that number 174 — exactly 25 percent — are part of the eight programs that will deal most with difficult travel, recovery and schooltime circumstances, according to the report: men’s and women’s soccer, baseball, softball, men’s and women’s tennis, volleyball and gymnastics.

According to the report, the teams currently take two to five conference-related away trips each year. In the Big Ten, “in cases where the travel requirements present a significant burden, charter flights or other conference alignments are of course possible,” the report noted. And once in the Big Ten, instead of taking nonconference trips to other parts of the country, they could remain in California, reducing travel time, the report suggested.

Fourteen teams are expected to experience minimal disruption because they “do not compete in structured conference competition or compete usually in multi-team events and tournaments,” according to the report: women’s beach volleyball, men’s and women’s golf, men’s volleyball, men’s and women’s cross country, men’s and women’s indoor and outdoor track and field, women’s rowing, women’s swimming and diving, men’s and women’s water polo.

The non-revenue sports at USC and UCLA will also have adjustments to make in their new league. (Kirby Lee / USA Today)

Most UCLA sports programs fly commercially, but football and men’s and women’s basketball already use charter flights for competitions. The teams have five or six conference away trips each season, according to the report, and would see increased flight times of one to three hours each way and time zone changes that may warrant an extra night away from campus.

UCLA’s current travel budget overwhelmingly goes to football and men’s and women’s basketball. In the 2019-2020 season, records obtained via an open records request showed the three programs took up 68 percent of the travel budget ($4,005,121), which left $1,924,297 to be split among the 22 other programs.

During the open session of the meeting, Pamela Brown, vice president for institutional research and academic planning for the UC system, talked about why the move would be beneficial for UCLA and answered questions from regents concerned about student-athletes dealing with more time away from the classroom.

Brown said in discussions with current Olympic sport athletes at the school, some said they look forward to added competition in their respective sports, potential increased exposure for name, image and likeness opportunities and perhaps being able to have academic specialists travel with them on the road during away trips.

UCLA’s official application letter to the Big Ten, obtained by The Athletic through an open records request, acknowledged the challenge being part of a widespread conference could pose.

“We appreciate the Big Ten’s commitment to working with us to ensure that travel impact and related issues will be reduced, so that our student-athletes are able to maintain a well-rounded college experience while competing at the highest levels,” chancellor Gene Block and athletic director Martin Jarmond wrote on June 30 to Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren.

In a letter to the Bruins Family announcing the move, Block and Jarmond wrote that it means enhanced resources for all of UCLA’s teams, from academic support to mental health and wellness. “And although this move increases travel distances for teams, the resources offered by Big Ten membership may allow for more efficient transportation options. We would also explore scheduling accommodations with the Big Ten that best support our student-athletes’ academic pursuits.”

In a message to the Trojan community, USC president Carol L. Folt said the school considered the additional travel. “We are committed to devoting the necessary resources to ensure our student-athletes can continue to thrive in their classwork with minimal travel disruption,” she wrote. “We know the Big Ten shares our commitment to prioritizing student-athletes’ well-being and academic demands, and we are fortunate we can spend the next two years … on travel and scheduling plans.”

The board of regents meeting offered an outlet for those not elated over the impending move. One regent, John Perez, told The Los Angeles Times that the regents retained the power to block UCLA’s move, saying, “all options are on the table.”

But it’s hard to ignore how lucrative joining the Big Ten will be for an athletic department like UCLA’s that had debt of $28 million in 2021-2022, according to the UC report. The impact on the other sports appears part of the package the universities are willing to accept in exchange for favorable positioning as college athletics experiences radical change.

“I just think about how, if you watch a college football game, inevitably there’s an ad from a school or the NCAA about how, ‘We’re students first,’ and that’s generally the message that’s being broadcast,” said Nola Agha, a professor of strategic management at the University of San Francisco who has previously taught sports economics. “But the decisions that have been made over and over in the last couple decades have, any time a school changes conferences, it’s not about a better academic fit for a student. It’s about a better revenue fit, or more specifically, a revenue gain.”

In the meantime, those already part of the Olympic sports world in the Big Ten don’t see much downside on their parts to the additions of USC and UCLA.

Sun-splashed Los Angeles is always going to be welcomed to those in the Midwest and East Coast, even if it means more travel.

“Is it longer? Yeah, it is. But it’s not dramatically longer for us having to do it one time,” said Wisconsin volleyball coach Kelly Sheffield. “It’s a different deal for them because they’re not just doing it one time. They’re not just going halfway across the country. They’re going across the whole country.”

(Photo of Stanford forward Madison Haley and UCLA defender Kaiya McCullough in 2019: John Hefti / USA Today)