Long Flight to Boca. Nothing compares to what Deifel would have faced.

Had life taken a little turn in 2008, Arkansas coach would have had infinite frequent flyer points instead of inconvenient 5,000 miles traveling in two weekends with the Razorbacks.

Fayetteville, Arkansas – Arkansas softball coach Courtney Deifel’s next few weeks will be something unusual. She will bundle her squad on long trips to Florida and then Arizona in consecutive weeks. It’s a pair of travels that, if taken by car, would total 5,000 miles round trip. However, even little alterations in her life’s path would have made this week’s six-game trip to Boca Raton, Florida for the Paradise Classic appear like a fast trip to Wal-Mart.

Deifel will always be a Pac-10 fan deep inside. She grew up in California and attended Cal. As a player, she helped Golden State win a national title in 2002.

When it came time to begin her coaching career, she did what many others before and after her would have done if given the opportunity. She spent her 2008 graduate assistant year at Oklahoma, where she learned the profession from famed softball coach Patty Gasso.

From there, it would have made perfect sense for her to return to California, where her connections and experience would have landed her squarely in the heart of one of the greatest softball conflicts ever. The Pac-10, later renamed the Pac-12, was in the midst of winning ten national titles in 11 years, distributed over five strong programs.

Instead, the California girl found herself on the East Coast, working as an assistant coach at Maryland. She subsequently made her way to Louisville, then returned to Maryland, where she became a head coach for the first time, before settling at Arkansas.

However, if she had taken the West Coast path, destiny would have inevitably led her to the East Coast. If Deifel had returned to Cal or nearby Stanford, she would have been looking ahead to next year and trying to persuade recruits of how much they’ll enjoy the team bonding gained during a 5,600-mile round trip to play Syracuse in an ACC game, 600 miles more than Arkansas will travel in the first two weeks combined.

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” Deifel explained. “I played in the Pac-10 days and then it turned to the Pac-12., I thought that was odd.” Of course, she could have wound up at UCLA, USC, Oregon, or Washington, all of which will join the Big Ten in a few months. That trip to Rutgers for a conference game would have required Deifel to transport her team 5,500 miles if she had ended up in Los Angeles and almost 5,700 miles if she had ended up in Washington.

“I think it’s a new time in college athletics,” Deifel remarked. “It’s a new era in college softball, and it’s strange.” It’s unfortunate, and it’s intriguing to watch how those West Coast teams now have to travel across the country to play conference games.” As the softball world adjusts to greater change, it provides yet another significant marker for the passage of time since Deifel hit 13 home runs for Cal on his way to a championship ring. It will be one more impressive element to which her future recruits will be unable to completely comprehend.