MORGANTOWN - Tammy Cavender's job has never been easy, but seldom has it been this exasperating.

There's not much that the travel coordinator for West Virginia's athletic department can do about it, though, just like there's not much she or anyone else can do when it's time to fill up her own car with gas.

"How are gas prices affecting you?'' Cavender asked. "Maybe you can cut something here or there, but at the end of the day there's not much you can do about it.''

Rising fuel prices are putting the pinch on WVU's athletic budget in all sorts of ways. Assistant athletic director for finance Russ Sharp points to everything from fuel to run the vehicles used by athletic department staffers - both cars for transportation and equipment used for maintenance - to the costs incurred by the department's food management service, Sodexho, for shipments from suppliers.

But where the real sticker shock comes is for the huge amount of travel required by athletic teams competing in a Big East Conference that stretches from Florida to Rhode Island up and down the East Coast to Chicago and Milwaukee in the Midwest. Throw in the occasional non-conference football game in Colorado or a bowl game in Arizona and the costs can be overwhelming.

It starts with a bus trip to Pittsburgh International Airport that in the past few years has increased from $600 to $700 to nearly $1,000 now, includes costs for more bus transportation in the destination city and can be sandwiched around a chartered flight that costs $240,000.

That's the tab for the charter on which West Virginia's football team will fly to Colorado in September.

"I remember when I submitted our list [of needed flights] to Delta, which does our charters,'' Cavender said. "The guy I deal with sent me back the list of prices with a note attached. It just said, 'Sorry, our fuel costs have gone up 60 percent.' ''

The cost of charter flights, however, isn't where things get tricky for Cavender in scheduling travel. That's pretty much the same as pulling up to the pump and seeing $4.09 a gallon. If you need the gas, that's what you pay. There is really no alternative means of travel for a football traveling party of 150. Busing to Denver or buying 150 tickets on multiple commercial flights are not options.

Most of West Virginia's athletic air travel in other sports is done on commercial flights, however. Sometimes that's not a problem. Often it is a juggling act, though.

MORGANTOWN - Tammy Cavender's job has never been easy, but seldom has it been this exasperating.

There's not much that the travel coordinator for West Virginia's athletic department can do about it, though, just like there's not much she or anyone else can do when it's time to fill up her own car with gas.

"How are gas prices affecting you?'' Cavender asked. "Maybe you can cut something here or there, but at the end of the day there's not much you can do about it.''

Rising fuel prices are putting the pinch on WVU's athletic budget in all sorts of ways. Assistant athletic director for finance Russ Sharp points to everything from fuel to run the vehicles used by athletic department staffers - both cars for transportation and equipment used for maintenance - to the costs incurred by the department's food management service, Sodexho, for shipments from suppliers.

But where the real sticker shock comes is for the huge amount of travel required by athletic teams competing in a Big East Conference that stretches from Florida to Rhode Island up and down the East Coast to Chicago and Milwaukee in the Midwest. Throw in the occasional non-conference football game in Colorado or a bowl game in Arizona and the costs can be overwhelming.

It starts with a bus trip to Pittsburgh International Airport that in the past few years has increased from $600 to $700 to nearly $1,000 now, includes costs for more bus transportation in the destination city and can be sandwiched around a chartered flight that costs $240,000.

That's the tab for the charter on which West Virginia's football team will fly to Colorado in September.

"I remember when I submitted our list [of needed flights] to Delta, which does our charters,'' Cavender said. "The guy I deal with sent me back the list of prices with a note attached. It just said, 'Sorry, our fuel costs have gone up 60 percent.' ''

The cost of charter flights, however, isn't where things get tricky for Cavender in scheduling travel. That's pretty much the same as pulling up to the pump and seeing $4.09 a gallon. If you need the gas, that's what you pay. There is really no alternative means of travel for a football traveling party of 150. Busing to Denver or buying 150 tickets on multiple commercial flights are not options.

Most of West Virginia's athletic air travel in other sports is done on commercial flights, however. Sometimes that's not a problem. Often it is a juggling act, though.

"It's not just the cost of the flights, it's the availability,'' Cavender said. "A lot of airlines have gone to smaller planes [and, in some cases, fewer departures] and it's tough to call and say we need 26 seats on one flight for the soccer team. An airline will say, 'OK, we have 10 seats on this flight and 16 on this one.' Then they'll look around a little more and say, 'OK, here's one with 26 seats, but this is what it's going to cost you.' ''

Case in point: West Virginia's men's soccer team has back-to-back games scheduled at Marquette and South Florida this fall, the first on a Friday night in Milwaukee and the second two days later in Tampa.

"Some trips are easy. Sometimes if you're just going to New York and back it's $250 [per ticket] and the times are good and that's OK,'' Cavender said. "But try going from Milwaukee to Tampa direct. Now you're talking $700 or $800 [per ticket] and it's a 7 a.m. flight the morning after a night game. You try to get something later and there's a connection, and maybe it involves two different airlines.''

Oh, and then there are the baggage fees that airlines have begun charging. US Airways just announced a $25 fee not for an extra bag, but for the first bag checked. Most airlines charge something for extra bags and even more for overweight bags. And athletic teams travel with equipment.

Cavender said that when the school's baseball team returned from Tampa and the Big East baseball tournament last month, the team not only was split up between Southwest and US Airways flights but also had to pay for extra bags checked on the US Airways flight.

Flying charters would simplify all of that, of course, but the cost has always been prohibitive and is just getting worse. Two years ago a charter to Greenville, N.C., for the football team's game at East Carolina was $81,000. The team returns to Greenville in September, but this time at a price tag of $101,000.

The football team is not, however, the only squad that exclusively flies charters. The men's basketball team did so this season for the first time. In the past, the team usually chartered only to a handful of games each year and flew commercial the rest of the time.

Those basketball charters, however, generally didn't cost the school anything above and beyond what it would have cost to fly commercial because new basketball coach Bob Huggins raised the money himself from boosters to pay for the difference because he wanted to be able to get his players to and from games more easily and not disrupt their class schedules any more than necessary.

"Yeah, he's pretty good at that,'' Cavender said of Huggins raising money for the charters. "That's been extremely helpful.''

Reach Dave Hickman at 348-1734 or dphickm...@aol.com.