Alabama appoints Ellis Ponder as director of football operations
Ellis Ponder has been appointed to replace Justin Dickens as Alabama’s director of football operations, the university announced Thursday.
Ponder, a Fairhope native, worked alongside Dickens the last two seasons as the associate director of football operations.
Dickens left the program last month.
“The University of Alabama has always been very special to me and I am looking forward to my expanded role,” Ponder said. “Coach [Nick] Saban is the best in the nation at running a football program and I truly appreciate the opportunity and his trust in me.”
Alabama and Wisconsin will kick off at 11 a.m. CT in the showcase game of Saturday’s Week 3 college football schedule. But what did it take for the Crimson Tide to get to their first road game of the season?
It’s a much bigger operation than most fans may realize.
Among the Delta 757 plane, a 53-foot 18-wheeler, two charter buses and more, around 250 people from the athletic department will make the trip. The 867-mile trek is the team’s longest road trip this season, but no matter the distance, road games are a huge undertaking.
“It’s extremely stressful to take this ship on the road,” said Ellis Ponder, Alabama’s football chief operating officer. “You’re relying on so many different people, outside entities that don’t necessarily work for Alabama football. We’ve gotten to the point where we take our buses for home games to away games regardless of where we play because I don’t want to deal with some group of people that I’ve never met.
“There’s a ton of things that the average fan has no concept of. They just turn their TV on and the Tide is in Madison in white jerseys, but it is a huge undertaking.”
Saturday’s game has a couple of extra layers to it. It’s Alabama’s first road game under coach Kalen DeBoer. Plus, it’s the program’s first trip to Wisconsin in 96 years. Traveling in the SEC to Auburn, Baton Rouge, La., or Knoxville, Tenn., comes with some level of comfort.
But this weekend will be a new experience, and it’s planned accordingly. The menu for Friday night’s dinner in Madison was chosen several months ago.
“Planning for away trips starts immediately after the postseason,” said Alison VandenBerghe, Alabama’s first-year director of football performance nutrition. “So when I got here (in January) is basically when the planning for this game started. The things that we really have to fine-tune and oversee is menu development, special diets, food preparation, packing the food and storage, working with travel coordinators, delivery of food — whether that’s for the bus, light, at the stadium and then making sure that we have like hydration stations kind of set up all throughout that as well. A lot goes into it.”
