Dear dimwit on the phone

I tend to forget about how busy this time of year is, in the same way you tend to forget the details of a bad car wreck. We had a major regional swim meet at the new pool in our town last weekend and simply could not peel anybody away to cover it. My high school guys were buried in state basketball and news side was short staffed. I was too sick to get out in public and the kids at our weeklies were all tied up. My wife is my secret weapon when all else fails - and a former swimming parent, to boot - but she was also recovering from our annual February/March cold. Sigh.

 

The thing that always bugged me about this time of year is the spring sports for high schools - especially baseball. The first allowable game date was always around right now, and it seemed like every school scheduled big, playing-every-day tournaments for the first and second weeks of the season. Half the time, there would still be snow on the ground and they would get cancelled, but if the planets aligned correctly and they could get the tournaments in, you'd have teams with a lot of players coming right off basketball season (or still playing basketball, if they made a postseason run, so you have a bunch of freshmen and sophomores filling in). They would have to cover about 100 innings in a two-week period in cold weather with young arms or tired players coming off basketball.

I never could understand why these coaches were so against starting the season with a couple of nonconference games during that first week and just easing into things, rather than jumping into the deep end head-first, then wondering why their team looked like crap, had arm injuries, etc., the first half of the season.

And as was mentioned, the constant parent questions of "Why aren't you covering high school baseball yet?" Well, we have 5 teams at boys state basketball, 4 at girls state basketball, the D-I men's and women's teams both at their conference tournaments, plus the non-local must-haves that trump first-week-of-the-season high school baseball. Not our fault your season starts too early.

 

It's a line from The Paper, when Michael Keaton is walking through the police station.

 

I didn't think I needed to specify when I asked for photos of PONY Baseball opening day that there be kids in the photos. I really appreciate you sending me two photos, including a donation pic, but I really wanted the players smiling that baseball is starting again. Oh, well, my mistake for assuming.

 

Exactly. We don't have snow, but weather can be unpredictable this time of year as well. Then a couple of OOC games this week and next week, boom, league starts. And then there's all the Easter invitationals ...

Can't blame the parental units for asking, but some are so single-minded on what their spawn are doing, they're unaware of everything else, even that the school across town, in the same league and/or school district, also plays that day, and there's also the reciprocal softball games in this area as well.

 

The Paper is a must watch

 

Kansas is great about keeping the seasons separate. Spring sports competition is not allowed to begin before the end of the state basketball tournaments and even then, the majority of schools still won't start until after spring break. The first baseball and softball games around here won't be played until March 31 and some track teams won't start until the first full week of April.

In the case of baseball and softball, it would be silly to start before spring break anyway. Each sport only gets 20 regular-season games and schools strongly prefer to play doubleheaders. That means there's seven weeks to get in 10 playing dates (Nine weeks if you go ahead and play before spring break). A lot of baseball and softball teams have 10-day gaps between playing days during the season because of this.

 

Weather prevents overlapping of the fall, winter and spring sports seasons in New England. The baseball diamonds may not be ready for play this year until the Kentucky Derby.

 

At one place Inworked, the weather was so bad every year that, fo about 3 weeks, the only sport playing was girl's volleyball.

It wasn't a bad break after dealing with basketball craziness for nearly a month, but after a while, it was hard to fight the temptation to yell at the volleyball players after they kept hugging followingq each point to cut it out and finish the game already.

 

Yeah. One of the things I disliked about working in the south was that the climate made it tempting to play, say, soccer or softball in February. Much preferred the later starts to spring sports.

 

Same for softball. There are some teams that can turn every routine groundout into a high-fiving hugathon in the circle. Like they say about end zone celebrations in football, act like you've been there before ...

 

Our southern state, high school soccer is a winter sport played from November to February. This winter, we had one game played in snow and another when it was 25 degrees. Portable propane heaters are pretty standard issue for most of the fans.

Our spring sports start the season at the end of February, but others a lot are earlier. Our baseball teams played a tournament against a bunch of schools from Alabama last week. The locals were a week into their season and had played four or five games. The Alabama teams had played 20.