To prepare for road games facing the University of Dayton football team early in the season, head coach Rick Chamberlin decided to take his team on the road this summer.

Dayton hasn’t played on the road for the first two weeks of the season since 1977, and Chamberlin felt the Flyers needed to get away from the “comfy confines” of Welcome Stadium to get ready for tough road tests against Illinois State and Duquesne, both of which are FCS scholarship programs, to start the season.

“The idea is to get away from your natural environment and to learn to adapt and to get ready,” Chamberlin said.

Recently, the Flyers practiced at Athletes in Action facility in Xenia. According to redshirt sophomore quarterback Will Bardo, the best part of practice might have just been the bus ride over.

“That was a bad practice,” Bardo said. “I don’t know if it was the bus ride or the new environment or what, but it was not a good practice for us.”

Chamberlin agreed, saying the players eventually grasped a lesson from that practice.

“To be honest with you, it was not one of our best practices,” the coach said. ” … It was a learning experience. It really was. The guys learned, ‘Hey, I’ve got to be focused. I’ve got to be poised when I’m going different places.’ ”

The Flyers tried another different location when they practiced at Stuart Field on the UD campus, which is primarily used for club sports and intramurals. The UD football team hasn’t practiced on campus since 1984, Chamberlain said.

“It was cool,” Bardo said. “There were students walking up and down Stuart Hill. It was a good experience.”

Chamberlin said he got the idea for the traveling practices when he was an assistant under former UD head coach and College Football Hall of Famer Mike Kelly, who is now a senior associate athletic director at UD.

“Several years ago, when coach Kelly was still here, we had a few road games early in the season,” Chamberlin said. “We went down to Fairmont High School and used their facility and it was something that just stuck with me.”

The fifth-year head coach has been known to make any travel arrangements necessary to get his players ready. Last season, Chamberlin had the team get ready for its road game against Central State by treating it like a home game.

The team had a Friday afternoon walk-through at McPherson Stadium in Wilberforce and then drove back to Dayton where the team watched a movie as a team function, which Dayton does each Friday before home games.

The Flyers then woke up Saturday morning and had a team meal in the morning before making the 35-drive over to Central State once again and grinding out a tough 17-7 win against the Marauders.

Dayton opens the season at 2 p.m. Saturday against Illinois State in Normal, Ill.