An unprecedented 22 days of rain in March has wreaked havoc on
spring sports
If you think the Gilroy baseball team plays some pretty good defense, you should see its groundskeeping skills.
Thanks to a very rainy month, the Mustangs have spent as much time fixing up their field as they have playing on it this season – if not more.
“The worst thing is we end up cleaning it up and it rains the next day,” said Gilroy head baseball coach Clint Wheeler. “We’re getting good at that.”
Tuesday’s game against Live Oak was rained out, as were the Mustangs’ first meetings with Palma and Salinas. The first meeting with the one-loss Chieftains was rescheduled for 3pm today and Wheeler said his squad will host the Acorns on Saturday at 1pm. And Salinas? That’s still up in the air, but might not get squeezed in until May.
If it seems like this year’s spring high school sports season has been plagued with an uncommonly high amount of rain outs, it’s because it has.
“In 20 years of being a player and a coach, this is the worst I’ve seen,” said Wheeler, who played his high school baseball at Gilroy High. “I can’t remember anything like this ever.”
Baseball isn’t the only outdoor spring sport that has been affected by the weather. According to Gilroy athletic director Jack Daley, three tennis matches, two golf meets and about six of the varsity softball team’s first nine games have been called because of rain.
Wet weather this time of year is expected. For that reason, a certain amount of rain outs in the spring are anticipated and the teams try to make their original schedules flexible enough to accommodate those games, Daley said.
But by this time of the season, the showers have usually tapered off. Nineteen days of wet weather have been recorded this month, just two days short of breaking a 26-year-old record for the Bay Area’s rainiest March ever.
“In the winter, sometimes you get soccer rained out or early on in February, some baseball games,” Daley said. “But to still have it rained out, it’s a little frustrating. It’s so hard to make games up.”
The rain has wreaked havoc on the spring teams trying to get into a rhythm on the field and drastically cut down practice time.
Wheeler said his team has taken batting practice in the infield – which is protected by tarps for the pitcher’s mound and home plate – just twice in the past three weeks.
“We haven’t had a normal practice in probably almost three weeks now,” said the coach, who installed some bases in the outfield a few years ago for use when the infield is too wet and unplayable.
Gilroy head softball coach Catherine Hallada was happy to see the dry varsity softball field get some rain in the first couple weeks of the season.
“When they started predicting rain, we started to get excited,” she said. “But at this point, it’s kind of just done. (The field is) starting to get puddles.”
Gilroy boys’ golf coach Kari Williams said the wet conditions haven’t affected her team’s scores. But it has kept them from practicing as much as she’d like.
Then there’s the obvious: It’s making the games a whole lot less fun.
The golf team came off the course waterlogged after Monday’s practice.
“They were all soaked from head to toe from how much it rained,” Williams said.
Added Wheeler, “We’re all just kind of sick of it…They walk out there, stretch, run and play catch and it starts raining.”
Hallada, feeling some cabin fever, attempted to have her team practice Monday in the rain.
“We had to do something. We were kind of throwing and hitting wiffle balls. You do what you’ve gotta do,” she said. “Today, just by chance our gymnastics team was away and we were able to sneak in the gym.”
In addition to creating scheduling headaches, rain outs also create something else: Difficulty in finding officials for make-up games. Three leagues, including the Tri-County Athletic League, share the same officials and there’s only so many available on any given day.
“That’s one of biggest issues, that when we start backing days up and everyone wants to reschedule (on the same day),” said Daley.
Added Wheeler, “They don’t have enough umpires in the organization.”
The athletic director said rain outs don’t create any financial loss, as long as bus companies and game officials are notified of the canceled events early enough in the day. He said neither of those have been a problem so far this season.
As the end-of-season Central Coast Section playoff seeding meetings for baseball and softball get closer, Hallada and Wheeler will have to think about what rescheduling moves will best for their teams. For instance, Wheeler doesn’t want to end up having to play a double-header against the first-place team in league the day before the seeding meeting. And Hallada would rather not have her Lady Mustangs playing three games in a row, especially with their ultra-tough TCAL schedule. Make-up league games take priority, so some non-league make-ups may have to be sacrificed.
“A lot of our games we’re going to have to play on Wednesdays,” said Hallada, whose team usually plays on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “Well, do we want to do that? Do we want to play three games in row?”
In the meantime, all the coaches and players can do is hope the sun will start to shine.
Or hope for the impossible ideal, like Wheeler.
“I just want a dome,” he said, laughing.
