United Makes Ultimate Save For Comets

Only hours after seeing his club hand the Baltimore Blast their first defeat at the 1st Mariner Arena, Missouri Comets President Brian Budzinski was with his players and coaches on a plane, set to head to Rochester for the second game of their weekend doubleheader in the northeast.

Then, the flight crew asked all aboard to disembark.

“We were sitting on the plane, and they couldn’t get it to reboot, and so they took everybody off the plane, and rescheduled everybody,” Budzinski said by phone.

It wasn’t an ideal situation. Sitting in Baltimore’s airport at just after 6 a.m. on Sunday morning, the Comets needed to be in Rochester, N.Y. for a 1 p.m. kickoff later that day, and Budzinski and the United Airlines staff started working on a plan to get them to the game on time.

“I say to the lady that’s working on it, the agent, ‘I think at this point I’d just feel more comfortable renting vehicles and driving up there. It’s six hours, we can guarantee that we can get there’,” Budzinski said. “We had checked the weather and everything, we knew we weren’t going to have any obstacles, and we had just rented four vehicles, so we were fine. And she said, ‘I guarantee you we can get you on this flight at 8:10, we’ll pay for your transportation down to D.C., I’ll book it myself, and we’ll hold the plane for you’.”

It was Budzinski’s first trip with the team this season. A keen observer of how other MISL teams operate, he was ready to make his first trip to Rochester to see if he could learn anything from the Lancers’ staff, or pass on anything to them to help continue to strengthen the MISL.

Now he and his team were sat in a minivan headed south to Washington’s Dulles airport, expecting to get on a flight. Things were going smoothly; the security gate had been alerted to the team’s situation, and their passage toward the gate was expedited. The Comets players had already pulled their uniforms from the team’s equipment bags and stashed them in their carry-on luggage, and they quickly made their way down the one-mile strip to get to their boarding gate.

They arrived, just in time to find that the plane had left without them.

“Obviously, some choice words started there, and some major concerns, because now it’s 8:25, 8:30, and driving is not an option at this point,” Budzinski said. “In six hours, we won’t get there at game time.”

Budzinski’s nerves were not helped when he began exchanging text messages with Lancers owner Sam Fantauzzo. With Rochester hosting an appreciation day for First Responders, a big crowd was expected at Blue Cross Arena, putting even more pressure on for the Comets to get to the game on time.

“[Sam] tells me ‘Brian, we’re going to have a crowd of 10,000 people today’,” Budzinski said. “And my stomach turns at that point, because this is a really big deal. We have to get there.”

Meanwhile, the players are doing what they can to stay focused. Some are looking to try and help find flights, while United had six employees calling other airlines to see if there were any openings to Rochester. Kim Roentved and his staff and captains were trying to work out who would go on which flight if the team needed to be split up.

And then, something remarkable happened.

“All of a sudden a guy comes around from the back,” Budzinski said. “[He] says, ‘we’ve got a private plane for you guys. It’s going to leave at 10:15, I’m going to personally walk you down to where it’s at, and I’m not going to leave until the door’s shut, and United is going to send you non-stop, just you guys, to Rochester’.”

Soon enough the Comets’ staff and players were on a private jet that had been commandeered by United, and in the air.

“Honestly, spirits were very high with the guys. They were excited, they wanted to play the game and they wanted to play it on time,” Budzinski said. “The spirit in the cabin wasn’t quite jubilation, but there was a lot of positive energy, and guys were really looking forward to getting to Rochester and finally playing the game.”

Less than an hour later, they were in New York State, where two limo-vans were waiting to whisk them to the arena in time for kickoff. With all of the team’s equipment still in Baltimore, waiting for a flight of its own, the Lancers trainers helped the Comets with their pregame routines, taping ankles and giving massages, and after the pregame festivities pushed kickoff back slightly, more than 10,000 fans got to enjoy the game.

Understandably given the circumstances, the Comets were not at their best, and the Lancers took an important victory to keep their playoff hopes firmly alive. But for Budzinski, that the Comets made it, in a large part because of the desire by United to make sure everything was put right, meant a lot.

“For us, with the way the world is now,” Budzinski said, “where people can brush off responsibilities and personal interests and accountability and that kind of stuff can kind of be pushed to the side, United went above and beyond anybody’s expectations and made sure the game was played on time, and quite frankly that a community in Rochester had the ability to go to its game and the events that were associated with it.

“United really went out of their way to take care of us, and the city of Rochester.”