Lots of years, today would be a whirlwind for Tracey Leinen, the Eagles' director of travel operations.
This year, it's a little different. Leinen will still follow the announcement of when the Eagles are playing in which cities with strong interest, but she won't be making any of the team's travel arrangements right away. Yesterday, Leinen gave birth to her second child, another daughter.
Fear not, though. The Eagles won't have to sleep under an overpass when they travel to, say, Oakland.
"Hotels are in dire straits right now. They're not going to get rid of my space. When they want an NFL team, they're going to hold on until they hear from me," Leinen said last week. "I'm going to start making a couple of calls in a couple of weeks. I gave everybody kind of a heads-up" about the impending birth.
Leinen, in her 15th year of arranging planes, trains, buses and equipment trucks for Eagles travel, said her perspective has changed a little over the years.
"I love the day the schedule comes out. That was like my favorite day. I sort of took a back seat to it and tried to digest it [before making arrangements] the last couple of years. Five, 6 years ago, I would make every hotel phone call I could make, and not leave the office until we had a hotel scheduled in every city," she said. "I'm not that frantic anymore. Again, if a hotel wants you and they have the space to take you, they're not going to get rid of it. They're going to wait until they hear from you. You're looking at $40,000, $50,000 worth of business on a weekend, where a lot of hotels are sitting empty. They tend to be more patient than they used to be. Especially with the way they're all hurting. I have more hotels calling me right now that have never taken a team, that all of a sudden want to get into the business so they can fill their hotel."
Also, Leinen has been to all the NFL cities now and has a lot of contacts in other teams' offices, so she believes she has a good feel for potential snags and pitfalls.
Like the hotels, airlines are not exactly turning away charter-flight business these days. Leinen figures she will have no trouble meeting her goal of having everything settled by June 1.
