If the unyielding string of rainy weekends has impacted your plans as of late, remember that it could be worse.
You could be a local athletic director trying to reschedule games, matches and meets.
The spring sports season is always a tricky one that requires creative scheduling and adaptation, but this year’s wet weather, and repeated weekend rain in particular, has caused extra challenges for the school officials tasked with scheduling and rescheduling athletic contests.
“I’ve been doing this for 37 years, and this is probably the roughest one I’ve seen in all those years of doing it,” said longtime Mount Desert Island High School Athletic Director Bunky Dow.
Dow explained how it’s difficult to schedule spring games and matches around senior class trips, school concerts and other events that close out the school year. The weather is bound to be a complication in that mix, but this year has been especially challenging, he said.
“This is the most I’ve adjusted my schedule since I’ve been doing this,” Dow said, with other factors like referee and umpire availability adding to the dizzying matrix of variables. “And it seems like it’s daily. There’s always something that comes up.”
The continued rain during the weekends — with at least one day of rain every weekend since late March — has been especially disruptive for teams that travel long distances and rely on weekend events like doubleheaders to round out their schedules.
Caribou Athletic Director Evan Graves said it’s been a challenge as different Vikings teams try to make games, matches or meets work safely with the weather on top of the logistical hurdle of traveling from Aroostook County.
“It seems like every event is just, it’s wet and the struggle is real,” Graves said.
Graves said the situation has been helped by a supportive community, an adaptable field crew and creative scheduling and constant collaboration among athletic directors from different districts trying to support the student athletes.
“Sometimes there’s no easy way — you’re giving out four options that aren’t great,” he said. “But at the same time, at least we’re trying our due diligence to give these kids a fair shake.”
It’s not always as simple as shifting one game with one opponent to another day, either. Sometimes the rain-induced scheduling changes require shuffling multiple games with multiple opponents to make everything work.
But as Dow stressed, athletic directors throughout the area are “in the same boat” and work together to find solutions.
“Like anything we’ll get through it, but there’s many obstacles in the way that make it difficult at times,” Dow said.
Orono Athletic Director Mike Archer thought there had been two or three spring seasons in the past 25 years that needed to be extended because of bad weather and resulting scheduling issues, but he doesn’t remember a season like this.
“I just don’t recall it washing out so many consecutive weekends,” Archer said. “And not only the weekends. But most of the time the weather is so bad over the weekend that you lose Monday because you just can’t get your fields ready.”
Archer said it’s been a “tough spring” and highlighted the challenges for student athletes, especially as they’ve had to return to practicing indoors at times. Teams expect to start the season indoors as snow melts and fields become playable, but having to go back to that in mid-May is a different story.
“Once you get outside and get into a rhythm, it’s pretty hard to come back inside mentally. And they’ve had to do that over and over and over again,” Archer said. “There’s really been no rhythm outside.”
The level of these weather challenges can vary depending on the sport or the facilities, as well. Turf fields have added a measure of respite for some programs, allowing some games to move forward that might not have been possible on wet grass.
The turf at Brewer’s Heddericg Field complex has helped for baseball and lacrosse games, Witches Athletic Administrator David Utterback said, though it hasn’t been a cure-all with at least one home game shortened by umpires because of field conditions. Utterback said that the Brewer softball field, though not turf, “acts like a turf field” because of its elevation and asphalt buffering next to a Hannaford parking lot.
“We’re more fortunate than some other places,” said Utterback, who doesn’t see the weather this spring as being worse or better than previous years in terms of its scheduling impact. When the facilities aren’t being used by Brewer high school and middle school teams, he has offered them to other area districts as well.
Both Utterback and Archer pointed to tennis as a spring sport particularly complicated by the weather — both in how the rain impedes gameplay and match scheduling.
“In tennis, once the surface gets wet, you’re done,” Archer said.
Despite the many challenges during the spring season, Dow said the athletic directors do what they can to accommodate each other and keep the focus on student athletes and their busy schedules, which include much more than athletics.
“The kids are the top priority,” he said.
