Winter weather hampers spring sports
There’s a good chance Whitefish’s
tennis teams will go to their first dual without ever serving a
ball on a regulation court. The softball team has yet to lace up
their cleats or field a fly ball, and the track team is still
hurdling mounds of snow.
Welcome to spring sports in Northwest
Montana.
Each of the high school sports teams
have been rotating practices in the gym since early March while
they wait for snow to melt in the valley. It’s a waiting game that
can set back a team’s progress, but it’s also one that’s widely
accepted as part of living in Whitefish.
“It’s part of Montana athletics,”
Whitefish activity director Jackie Fuller said. “This happens
almost every year.”
The gym has been in constant action,
with practices taking place from 6:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. nearly every
day. Early in the season, the coaches formulated a plan so all the
teams get a morning and evening practice.
Fuller is busy rescheduling games and
matches slated for this weekend in Whitefish. The Friday softball
game has been moved to Polson, and the tennis duals with Polson and
Bigfork will likely be moved as well.
“There’s a lot of working with other
athletic directors to make it work,” Fuller said.
The veteran coaches have been doing
their best to get their teams ready for the season. Boys tennis
coach Chris Schwaderer set up regulation nets in the gym and says
they’ve worked fairly well.
“Our focus has been on getting
repetition,” Schwaderer said. “They’ve been hitting the ball a lot,
maybe more than in a typical year. I think they’ll be ready to
go.”
With no lines on the gym floor,
Schwaderer said there could be some “psychological challenges” when
they take to the court for the first time.
The tennis and track teams joined
forces and tried to shovel snow from tennis courts at Riverside
Park in mid-March, but the knee-deep snow was too big of a job to
finish without a plow.
“We got out there with shovels for an
hour and got just about nothing done,” Schwaderer said. “We
literally shoveled just one path from the gate to the net.”
Early this month, high school custodian
Alan Dias made 40 trips around the running track and plowed 2-3
feet of snow. The team has been running, but the infield is still
covered shin-deep with snow in areas.
The softball team may have the most
difficult time overcoming the challenges of indoor-only
practices.
“We don’t get to field grounders off
the dirt, and we don’t get to catch fly balls,” coach Alan Compton
said. “The depth perception is totally different. It’s something
you can’t simulate.”
The Glacier Twins have been struggling
to get on the baseball diamond, too. Huge puddles have formed in
the Memorial Park outfield, and crews are using an industrial pump
to empty out an overflow tank beneath the field, coach Lindsay
Fansler said.
It’s been worse though. Fuller
remembers a very winter-like spring when the track team didn’t get
on the running oval until a week before divisionals in May.
“Some years we’re blessed, like last
spring when we didn’t cancel one thing,” Fuller said. “But the year
before that, we were running around like crazy.”