It’s a virtually unprecedented spring in Oceana County sports. Baseball and softball fields sit unused due to lousy weather. Long-jump pits are full of water. It’s mid-April, and with the exceptions of Pentwater and Hart, no county team has played a baseball or softball game, and no county team has had a track meet. The Oceana County baseball and softball tournament, scheduled for Saturday, was the most recent victim, with rain keeping the Hesperia fields from being suitable to host the event.
“It’s definitely been an unusual spring,” Shelby athletic director Chuck Persenaire said. “I’ve been coaching at Shelby for 25 years. I haven’t seen a spring like this. We went from last year, where basically we got on the fields right away, to this year, we’re taking fly balls in the parking lot. Track hasn’t been outside, really at all.”
Even the events schools have been able to get in have been affected by weather. Pentwater’s season-opening soccer game was played on brown grass that had only recently gotten out from under snow, and the baseball doubleheader against Hart on the same day saw piles of snow sitting just beyond each baseline fence.
Shelby managed to play a soccer game Thursday afternoon against Newaygo, a 2-1 loss, but “it was miserable,” Persenaire said. “Rain was coming down sideways. Anytime the ball was going in the air it was going sideways and carrying out of bounds. It was not well-attended. We had a faithful fan show up and put up a pop-up deer blind and watched the game.”
While soccer games have somewhat been spared from the spate of weather-induced cancellations this month — several of them have been washed out, but at least a few have been played — the other spring sports have seen their schedules get shredded. Not only have baseball and softball games and track meets been canceled or postponed, for the most part the teams haven’t even been able to practice outside. Hurdlers have had to train in a hallway with makeshift starting blocks while baseball players have to settle for taking indoor batting practice.
Even when the weather clears up and allows games to be played, Persenaire expects the inability to practice in the usual way to affect the level of play when the seasons get rolling, saying times will likely be higher in the running events and the jumping events will produce lower-than-usual results.
“If you can’t get outside to do that, there’s no way you will be in the correct form,” Persenaire said. “That’s all stuff you work on at practice. You can’t simulate what’s going to happen on a track in a hallway. Until you have someone on a mound throwing at you, you can’t simulate that in a gym with a roof.”
Golf is also an issue, Persenaire added, as the school teams have to work around the available schedule of their home courses. Persenaire said that Shelby’s home course, Oceana Golf Club, has been very good to the Tigers, but some courses may not permit golfers to play due to poor conditions.
While the athletes struggle to get into game shape practicing indoors, area athletic directors are running into trouble rescheduling all the canceled contests.
While nonconference games are not a huge problem to lose, several conference events have fallen by the wayside, and it’s vital to the leagues to get those games in so a conference champion can be crowned and all-league teams can be determined.
“The one track meet we had to reschedule, we have a date in our calendar for a rain date for that, but do you use it on the first conference meet of the year?” Persenaire said. “It worked out where Whitehall, Mason Co. and I had a date later in the season (Apr. 24) where we were all open.”
In sports like baseball, softball and soccer, where make-up dates are less readily available and can be more complicated to schedule, more drastic steps may be necessary to get all the necessary conference games on the slate.
“There is a possibility we can play on some Saturdays, those kind of things,” Persenaire said. “Some non-conference stuff will have to get canceled and league stuff put into those spots if this keeps happening. (Hesperia A.D.) Mike (Fosburg) was having this same discussion.
“Everyone’s going to look at every open date they have. With baseball you have to take arms into consideration, because pitchers can only throw so many innings in a week.”
Another factor that affects some schools is that some athletes in the county play multiple sports in the spring. While Shelby’s athletic policy doesn’t allow for dual-sport same-season athletes and neither Hart nor Hesperia have any such students, Pentwater and Walkerville have several athletes that play multiple spring sports, which creates further complications. Falcons’ athletic director Dan Nugent said that with just 13 soccer players on his team roster, with several of those also playing softball or running track, any make-up date needs to line up with the other sports in order for the Falcons to have a full roster.
So much of the spring sports schedule has been wiped out that quiet talk has begun among fans on whether state playoff events might be pushed back to allow for those events to be made up. However, since the rainouts haven’t affected everyone in the state, such a move seems unlikely.
“Whether the MHSAA moves stuff back, I doubt it,” Persenaire said. “It’s hard for them to move it because of the places that are hosting these events. For the state meets, for golf and track, are already scheduled. It would be difficult from that standpoint for them to move.”
Even as bad as it’s been weather-wise in terms of sporting events in Oceana County, things could be worse.
“I’m glad I’m not up north talking to people in the Petoskey area,” Persenaire said. “They got three to four inches of snow (last week) on top of the foot they still had on the ground. If we get some wind and dry that (rain) up, we’re good to go.”
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