gram shovel off Downes field during the week before the start of the. PHOTO CONTRIBUTED BY BROOKLINE ATHLETICS.
Outdoor spring sports are often tormented by weather. Baseball, track, softball and golf have to worry about their competitions being rained out, fields being soggy for days on end, orange signs dotting the towns’ fields and postponements. That is all normal for the spring sports season.
This spring, a whole new challenge presented itself after the snowiest winter on record for the region made its mark. Outdoor surfaces were unplayable for the first few weeks of the spring sports season, which meant adjustment for almost every spring team at the high school.
Athletic Director Pete Rittenburg said that he estimates the snow will push outdoor spring sports about three weeks off schedule. To accommodate a possibly extreme condensation of the game schedules, the MIAA decided to push back the dates that the regular season has to end on for each sport, known as cutoff dates.
“The MIAA set cutoff dates for the regular season for every sport,” Rittenburg said. “Generally speaking, they’re in late May around Memorial Day, and Memorial Day happens to be very early this year, so what the MIAA was able to do is move everything back roughly a week.”
Rittenburg said that the Bay State Conference Athletic Directors have also been instrumental in helping the league compress the schedule for the different sports to try to insure as normal a season as possible. They met together for a nine hour meeting before the season started to work through all the scheduling needs of every league sport.
“The result is that we expect to get all of our schedules done, it’s just going to be a more compressed season,” Rittenburg said. “In some sports, there is a concern about playing three or four contests in a week, but the one in particular we looked at and made a modification to league rules was baseball, where the Bay State Conference is a nine inning league. So what we decided to do to limit pitch counts was we elected to go with a seven inning schedule for the regular season this year.”
Rittenburg explained that in a four game week, a rarity in other years but a reality for this spring, nine inning games would amount to 36 innings for the week, as opposed to a seven inning game schedule that would limit the week to 28 innings. Taking off eight innings on any given week saves a game’s worth of pitches which, according to Rittenburg, could prove valuable for the health of Bay State Conference pitchers.
There are many other sports with viable concerns about their playing surface or game schedules. Teams that do not necessarily come to mind when thinking of the challenges snow poses are the water sports, such as crew and sailing, that practice on the Charles River. The Charles River has only been available for these teams to use for around two weeks, as the river continues to thaw.
Both sailing and crew have not been able to use as many indoor facilities as they usually have access to because of the struggles of the other outdoor sports, which often occupy the facilities. Sailing was mostly restricted to a classroom for the first couple weeks of the season.
“I think what’s been the biggest challenge with sailing is that so much of sailing is about being out on the water doing it and learning by doing it, and nobody in the room has had a chance to do that,” sailing coach Perry Dripps said. “It’s incredibly frustrating for me as the coach because we can talk tactics and team racing and all these different concepts, but until you are actually able to see it out on the water, it’s really hard to get a grasp of all these different concepts.”
Assistant Athletic Director Kyle Williams came up with an extensive scheduling matrix in an attempt to book the indoor spaces available to high school teams while all of the outdoor facilities in the town were covered with snow. Williams said communication with coaches was a major part of the schedule creation, and he received a lot of feedback and created a couple of different drafts.
“Basically I broke up every available space and contacted a lot of different groups to see who is using what spaces when, and then I basically created lots of blocks,” Williams said. “What I did was I tried to distribute those blocks as evenly as I could.
The athletic department also organized a “shoveling party” campaign in order to clear Downes field during the week before the season. Among the teams that participated were boys and girls lacrosse, boys and girls track and boys and girls crew. The tennis teams shoveled the tennis courts at the Lawrence school and the rugby team shoveled Skyline park.
Girls varsity lacrosse player and sophomore Paget Goldthwait said that although her team had to come in before school for a practice once, the snow did not have a major effect on the team’s preseason training, asides from limiting certain elements of their practices.
“Tryouts in gyms aren’t really fun. It was harder to do a lot of the things we wanted to do for tryouts,” Goldthwait said.
The scheduling also involved some teams having to come in to practice as early as 6 a.m. and other teams had to stay as late as 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. to get in a practice or tryout. Williams and Rittenburg both expressed their appreciation for the patience of the coaches and athletes.
“The cooperation and the patience level has been extraordinary,” Rittenburg said. “I think everybody understands what we are up against. It’s a once in hopefully a century winter.”
Edmund Geschickter can be contacted at [email protected].
