Snow covered the ground when spring sports arrived — an omen of bad weather that would continue to plague the season.
Late snowfall and rain caused many games to be rescheduled or completely canceled. There were so many cancellations that the athletic office stopped counting them.
“This has been one of the craziest springs since I’ve been here,” said athletics secretary Emily Cates. “I’ve been here a little over six years and it feels like one of the worst as far as rainouts.”
Baseball’s C-team, for example, had more than two thirds of its games cancelled.
“It’s just annoying,” sophomore Luke Zenger said. “It gets you kind of out of routine, and you are not always in the mindset that you are going to play because they are cancelled all the time when you actually do play.”
C-team baseball wasn’t the only spring sport that got the bad end of the weather. The golf team also had a season to forget.
“Well, three tournaments have been cancelled due to the weather,” JV golfer freshman Braxton Olson said. “And they have rescheduled them twice already, and they still keep on getting cancelled.”
Braxton has a putting routine he does every night before tournaments but for no point many nights this year.
“It was a waste of my time because I stayed up a little too late working on my putting but then it got cancelled the next day,” he said, “and then I have to work on my putting again.”
Perhaps, Cates has gone through the most trouble this spring as she worked to reschedule games. With each cancellation, she has to notify staff members, opposing teams, officials, the bus company, the attendance office, media and others.
“We just have this whole list of about 15 groups of people that we have to notify for every event,” she said. “And then if we don’t have a rescheduled date right then, then we have to go back later and do it all over again with the date to get the date out to everybody”
In order to make up games, some teams have faced long weeks full of regular and make-up matches.
“You’re really tired, and you’re not going to play as well as you always do,” Zenger said. “And it is going to be really hard to get all your homework done that week.”
For the athletes, Cates said it has been stressful because they don’t know what to expect.
“They get all hyped up for a game and then it doesn’t happen, and then they have to practice,” she said. “Or they get hyped up for a particular opponent and then they don’t play that one and then that one is rescheduled to be like two or three games away, so they have to get all hyped up again. So, it has been pretty crazy.”