Last Tuesday, the American way of life was disrupted by terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As a subset of the country’s lifestyle, collegiate athletics also came to a standstill.

As airports closed down due to suspicions of further hijackings, sporting events across the nation were postponed or canceled.

Now, the airways are opening up, and teams can get to and from their destinations.

However, the question of whether flying is safe has been brought to the forefront of people’s minds across the country. The same holds true for teams at Iowa State.

Head women’s golf coach Julie Manning has four more tournaments on her team’s schedule.

They will take aircrafts to three of them, even though the competitions are all within reasonable driving distance.

“I think everybody has a little reservation about any sort of travel at all,” Manning said. “Everyone’s going to be a little bit nervous about [flying] until we do it the first time.”

This weekend, Manning’s squad will likely board a flight bound for Denver as the Cyclones prepare to play in the Pioneer Fall Invitational. The coach is ready to drive the team if need be.

“We have not discussed travel yet, so I don’t know how apprehensive they are about flying,” she said.

“If we have one or two indvivduals who just aren’t comfortable with going up in a plane, then we have to respect that.”

The football team will return to the field this weekend as they travel to Athens, Ohio. The squad plans to fly, despite all of Tuesday’s events.

“It’s been a real hard week on all of us,” head coach Dan McCarney said. “We were extremely upset about what happened.”

One team that won’t have to worry about air travel this weekend is men’s golf. They weren’t planning to board a plane until early October.

“I’m hopeful that everything will be normal by the time we have to travel,” head coach Jay Horton said. “I would have been real leery to get on a plane this week.”

Coaches say that the administrators have not contacted them about changing travel arrangements to competitions.

“The university has not come forward and sat down with us [to] set a policy,” Manning said. “I do believe we’ll be communicating within the department because of the amount we do travel.”

Until that time, coaches and teams don’t see any setbacks that will keep them from flying as previously planned.

“Right now, we’re not changing any of our schedules when it comes to flying,” McCarney said. “The only delay that we know of would be getting through security at the airports.”

McCarney said that the football team had been traveling by bus to certain locations, such as Iowa City and Lawrence, Kan.

“We are doing some of that [traveling] from a financial standpoint. It has nothing to do with last week,” he said. “If Bruce Van de Velde came and said `We don’t want you to go on a plane’, we’d follow their lead.”

Although senses have been heightened around the country, the populace is trying to find a way to get back in the air.

“No one has come to me and said `I don’t want to fly on a plane,'” McCarney said. “We’re looking forward to getting back to as normal a schedule as we possibly can.”