5 minute read

Spring sports cope with familiar hurdle of adverse weather

from 2023 May Current

from 2023 May Current, page 20

The Crest

By Craig Howard Current Contributing Editor

The beginning of Bryan Peterson’s senior baseball season at West Valley High School and the start of his professional career with the Gulf Coast League Red Sox remains a study in climate contrast.

An elite outfielder and hitter, Peterson had established himself as one of the region’s best prospects well before his senior campaign in 2008. The Boston Red Sox selected the Spokane native in the 11th round of that June’s first-year player draft and promptly sent him to their GCL affiliate in Bradenton, Florida where he batted .277 on sun-soaked fields bordered by palm trees.

Just a few months earlier, Peterson and his WV teammates began practice with layers of snow covering their home diamond.

“I remember my senior year being really cold to start with sporadic snow,” Peterson recalls. “It was very difficult to get ready for the season.”

With baseball kicking off in late February weather more suited for bobsledding, the Eagles moved workouts to the gym to get in some degree of practice.

“You make the best of it but you can’t throw too far inside and you’re not getting true hops like you would outside,” Peterson said.

When the season finally started, cold temperatures remained. Peterson remembers layering to stay warm and avidly following local weather patterns.

“Each morning, I’d wake up and check the forecast to see if we were going to be playing that day,” he said.

Several games featured sudden swirls of hail that resulted in teams taking shelter in the dugout.

“You’d just wait it out and then get back to playing,” Peterson said.

Peterson wore two sets of batting gloves on each hand when the barometer dipped and kept another pair as backup. Even then, contact off the handle or end the bat created a painful reverberations.

“The ball doesn’t jump off the bat as well in the cold,” he said. “As the weather warmed up, I felt more comfortable at the plate.”

Baseball isn’t the only spring sport that faces adversity in the early part of the season when Inland Northwest conditions remain frosty. Chuck Bowden has been coaching track and field at Central Valley High School for the past 32 years and says the start of the season is always accompanied by “a winter push.”

“You’re looking at three legitimate weeks of what is really still winter,” Bowden said. “It’s tough for our sport to be what it is with cold weather.”

Bowden said sprinters and throwers face particular challenges when practice moves inside. Some athletes grow tired of the indoor agenda and walk away from the sport. Many stick it out and develop a resilience that Bowden says is a trademark of the Bears’ program. The CV boys placed first at the 4A state meet last season with ambulatory events included while the girls went undefeated in the Greater Spokane League and took the regional crown along with the boys’ squad.

“Once we start competition, we don’t get to choose the weather,” Bowden said. “It is what it is and this is why we’re tough, this is why we’re good.”

Bowden said last year’s campaign was the coldest he can recall in his coaching career. At the beginning of each season, he reaches out to fellow coaches on the westside of the state, letting them know the Bears are once again surrounded by frozen tundra.

“Last year, we hosted a meet on March 25 and the weather was nice,” Bowden said. “The rest of the that season was cold through state.”

Athletes with ParaSport Spokane can relate to scaling the uphill weather battle each year. The program is known for producing some of the best wheelchair competitors in the world and often draws from Valley high schools. ParaSport Executive Director Teresa Skinner said rugged weather represents an opportunity for “a character push.”

“We try and make it fun,” she said. “Our job is for them not to quit.”

ParaSport practices at the Valley Christian School track and, each June, hosts the Pinecone Classic, a meet that took place last year at Ridgeline High School in Liberty Lake and this year will be held at Whitworth University. The squad often travels to warm-weather venues during Spokane’s spring. The third week of May will find the team participating at the U.S. Paralympic Track and Field National Championships in San Diego.

“We’re not usually traveling to a meet unless it’s to a warmer climate,” Skinner said.

Keeping the spring sports schedule on track can be a complex juggling act at local schools, particularly when the weather runs off course. Ridgeline Activities Coordinator Grady Emmerson says he and his counterparts at local high schools “can be on the phone all day” reviewing a myriad of concerns from field conditions to transportation to scheduling officials.

“On a bad weather day, we’re constantly communicating with each other,” Emmerson said. “Coaches are running out to the field, checking on conditions. Usually, if we have rain that stops by noon, we’re going to be playing that day.”

From squeegees that mop up soggy tennis courts to plastic tarps that protect baseball and softball diamonds from a downpour, Emmerson – a former linebacker at Washington State – coordinates Ridgeline’s defense against unpredictable spring weather. The dirt on Falcon diamonds now contains a healthy dose of clay to bolster against damp threats.

Emmerson points out that schools on the west side and in areas like the Tri-Cities get a jump on practice and competition in the spring.

“We’ll go to the Tri-Cities and they’ve already got four (baseball or softball) games in,” he said. “Sometimes, by the first game of the year, teams around here haven’t even taken infield or outfield because we’ve been inside.”

Still, Emmerson said he’s been impressed by the determined approach of local coaches and athletes in dealing with climate uncertainty.

“It’s pretty amazing,” he said. “Talk about resiliency.”

A GSL golf match in Liberty Lake on April 13 featured a collection of resolute teams that were finally called off the course halfway through the tournament when a severe hailstorm made conditions unsafe. Lewis and Clark girls’ coach Michelle Grafos, an All GSL golfer at CV who went onto play at the University of Washington and become a PGA professional instructor, said it was the first league competition she can recall in years to be canceled due to weather.

When Grafos was at CV, she would venture to the Tri-Cities to practice in early spring when Spokane temperatures still hovered near or below freezing. There was also the old Golf Dome off Fancher that offered an indoor driving range. Grafos is the proprietor of a golf school in the Valley that opens in early November and runs until the end of February, giving local golfers a respite from the cold.

“To be a good golfer in this area you’ve to got to be mentally tough,” Grafos said. “You have to know how to navigate the weather.”

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