Spring Sports Season Is Short If you have read my columns before, you know I have a soft spot in my heart for coaches of spring sports. I think they have one of the hardest jobs around for a lot of reasons.
Indiana’s unpredictable weather coupled with spring break and senior leaders being distracted by their impending graduation adds a lot of stress to a spring coach’s plate.
One of the things that happens in spring is that the postseason tournaments tend to stack up on top of each other. This past week, for example, we had softball and baseball sectionals, boys and girls track and field regionals and tennis regionals. Only boys golf teams didn’t have postseason action going on.
My brethren in the print media were lamenting the fact that they couldn’t be at both softball sectionals and girls track and field regionals be-cause they were held on the same nights. With papers shrinking their staffs, it’s impossible for them to cover it all for their readers. I genuinely feel bad for them because they really are trying to be everywhere.
You can also appreciate the conflicted hearts of parents and grandparents who have a daughter or granddaughter playing in a softball sectional and a son/grandson playing in a baseball sectional in different town at the exact same moment, can’t you?
A member of the media suggested on Twitter this week that they should stagger the spring sports seasons in an effort to lessen the conflicts. In a perfect world that would be great.
I appreciate the thought, but there really is no way to do that the way we would all want.
The challenge starts, and ends, with the weather. Most baseball teams north of Indianapolis only get about 5-10 outside practices (under normal conditions) in March before the first game pops up on their schedule at the end of the month. They have to start games in March because they have to block off about 10 days for spring break (that’s a different column for a different day).
That means track teams, for example, have about five weeks to cram in their seasons before their conference meets and then their sectional meets the following week. Tennis has about the same time window. Baseball and softball have only an extra week.
So that forces athletic departments into the unenviable task of scheduling events with full understanding that some of those events will get postponed, maybe more than once, and eventually be completely cancelled. Conference games take priority, and when the days start to pass and the sectionals start to get big in the windshield, non-conference games get bumped.
Everyone is in the same boat. Everyone deals with the same basic problem. And that includes administrators, players, coaches, families and umpires—they all put their outside lives on hold each spring because they never know when they will have a game postponed to a different date.
The suggested solution in the social media discussion was this: “well, you have all summer.”
No…no you don’t.
To extend seasons well into June is not a good idea. Summer is short enough (you’ve heard that from me before), but if you play regular season baseball and softball through the end of May and run their tournaments over the month of June, you do a huge disservice to everyone involved. Graduating seniors may need to get jobs to help pay for their college expenses or to start training programs for their college sports teams. Underclassmen have other coaches demanding their time during June and July, and they may have get jobs, too. Oh, and the family might want to get away for a while during the summer.
So, what’s the solution?
Truthfully, there isn’t one.
Teams from southern and south-central sections of the Hoosier state do not have near the problems with this we do up here. But we live here, and we have the do the best we can.
And forcing kids and their parents into situations usually either turns them off or forces them to make a choice between two sports—and that’s not really what anyone wants either, right?
About all we can do is pray for good weather every spring.
I know a lot of you have been doing that for a long time already.
