By AARON BEARD

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Ask Cal women’s coach Charmin Smith about her team’s first run of cross-country travel for Atlantic Coast Conference games last year, and she’ll shrug off the question about the challenges of doing it.

“We’re in the ACC, we’re happy to be in the ACC,” she said Tuesday during the league’s preseason media days. “And we get on a plane and we go.”

Still, the league’s expansion to stretch from the Pacific to the Atlantic coastlines last year, along with a similar change in the Big Ten, led to lots of flight hours, airborne study halls and sleep-altering routines as men’s and women’s teams criss-crossed the country. The losses piled up at a much higher rate than other road games in both leagues, too. And the challenges were particularly acute for teams like Ca

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