April 4, 2018 at 1:34 p.m.
SNOW-GO!
Winter returns to Wisconsin smothering the start of spring sports season
SNOW-GO!
One look outside and it's painfully obvious why those contests won't happen today or perhaps any time in the near future.
Two snowmakers over the past six days have dropped nearly a foot and a half of snow on the area, turning the first week of the outdoor spring sports calendar into a complete and utter whiteout.
Mother Nature even affected the one Rhinelander indoor event scheduled for Tuesday. The Great Northern Conference indoor track meet scheduled at Northland Pines was postponed as most GNC schools - including Rhinelander - canceled classes Tuesday due to inclement weather. The event has been rescheduled for next Thursday.
That's far from the only event off the docket as this latest dose of winter weather threatens the entire slate of RHS sporting events into next week and beyond.
What's canceled
As far as Rhinelander is concerned, all outdoor events scheduled north of State Highway 29 are off until at least next Thursday. The last of the events in question, an invite for the RHS girls' soccer team this weekend in Green Bay, was officially canceled Wednesday morning. Though Southwest High School in Green Bay has an artificial turf field, the Bay Area received roughly as much snow as the Northwoods did in the system that pushed through the region late Monday through early Wednesday.
According to RHS activities director Brian Paulson, all outdoor games in the Great Northern Conference through April 10 have been postponed and/or rescheduled. He said the conference softball, girls' soccer and boys' tennis games affected will be moved to different dates, though the plan for baseball was still up in the air and will be reevaluated April 13.
"If we don't have any games in by then we're going to meet as ADs," he said. "We'll talk with our coaches and discuss the schedule. There are a couple of options on the table for baseball."
Benefit to some
While the winter blast comes at an inopportune time in terms of playing games, some RHS coaches said they actually do not mind the extra time they will have indoors to prepare for the season. In particular, RHS baseball coach Joe Waksmonski and boys' tennis coach Bob Heideman said the snow will allow their teams to make up for time lost last week while a number of their players were out of town on spring break.
"We had so many guys missing that we just didn't get to a lot of our team defensive stuff," Waksmonski said. "Now, obviously, we have time to get to that. Had we been playing we would have had a lot of guys not practice a lot of our situational stuff. Now we definitely have some time to practice that."
Heideman added the additional time indoors allows his players to further refine their games without the pressure of having to scrimmage others for a spot in the varsity lineup or play another team with conference points on the line.
"I think in our situation it's a benefit," he said. "I like, at the beginning, to really tell a kid at the beginning, 'Make this change. You'll be better for it and don't worry about (the results).' If you have a larger block of time where you're not competing, they have a larger block of time to do that in. I like that idea."
Of course, all of this is balanced with trying to maintain morale for teams that were on the cusp of getting outdoors as recently as last week.
"The hardest part about this is just keeping the kids motivated, and the coaching staff motivated, to keep practicing indoors," RHS girls' soccer coach Dan Millot said. "You have to find creative ways to coach."
Fighting for space
Not only do coaches have to get creative with how they practice, when they practice becomes an issue as well given the limited space inside Rhinelander High School.
Paulson already had an indoor practice schedule set for the baseball, softball and tennis - the teams most easily affected by rain. But now he has to find times and places for the track, girls' soccer and golf teams to train with their outdoor facilities under snow.
"We don't have the Northland Pines fieldhouse. We don't have the Lakeland fieldhouse. We have to juggle around with what we have here," he said. "Track's been practicing indoors in the halls and the commons, doing their drills. They know they have that always, but the kicker is soccer. Soccer's always been outside. Now we have to redo the schedule. We have one team going in the mornings this week so we can allow for two-hour practices."
Scheduling crunch?
There has already been talk among the Great Northern Conference ADs about implementing the same plan that was in place back in 2013, the last time snow threatened to hamper the schedule this late into the season. That year, the official conference season did not begin until the final week of April for baseball, softball and boys' tennis, and May 2 for girls' soccer. Any games between conference opponents that were played prior to those dates were considered non-conference contests.
That season baseball and softball games were rescheduled as doubleheaders during the second half of the season to ensure each sport still played a full complement of 12 conference games.
Despite the extra strain that could pose to his pitching staff, Waksmonski said he would prefer the conference stick to the 12-game format.
"I don't think six games is a good enough way to tell everyone who the conference champions are, who are the best players in the conference, things of that nature," he said. "I would much rather play the 12 conference games as opposed to six conference games and a number of non-conference games."
Girls' soccer and boys' tennis weren't as fortunate in 2013. Both sports were relegated to single round-robin schedules with the conference playing only six girls' soccer games and four boys' tennis dual meets.
"I just hope we get to play the full conference season," Millot said. "It's always nice to play a team twice. Really the sport of soccer and the scheduling forever has been based on a home and an away event. That would be nice to have. Right now, you look at the schedule and see what is best."
The main side effect of the 2013 schedule, especially with a wet start to the month of May, was a crammed and condensed schedule that saw teams play games on every day of the week except Sunday. The RHS baseball team played 11 games in eight days that year, the Hodag softball team played 14 games in nine days and the RHS girls' soccer team had a stretch of five days and five days.
Millot, who's coached the Hodag girls for more than two decades, said he recalls a year where his team played 10 times in 14 days, due to a late spring, and vowed to not let that happen this year, if at all possible.
"The thing that we have to be careful with is when we reschedule that we think about our athletes first, especially with soccer and what these bodies are going to go through with so many games in a row," he said.
That would likely mean the elimination of some non-conference games. Some non-conference games this week - including baseball and softball at Wittenberg-Birnamwood and a baseball doubleheader Saturday against Shawano - have been canceled outright with no intentions to reschedule. Paulson postponed today's baseball game at Merrill and tomorrow's softball game at Merrill in hopes of playing the nearby Bluejays at some point later in the season that is mutually beneficial to both teams.
"If there's an opportunity that opens up that works for both teams, without overtaxing the kids, we know we're going to talk," he said.
Keeping options open
Many of the teams are open to doing whatever it takes to get in some sort of competition sooner rather than later.
After it became apparent that Rhinelander would not host Shawano on Saturday in baseball, the Hodags tried to work a deal with Stratford to head south and play at a neutral site in Westfield, roughly an hour north of Madison. However the snow that fell in that area Tuesday, coupled with a forecasted high in the mid-to-upper 30s on Saturday, put that opportunity on ice.
Weather willing, the Hodag baseball and softball teams are already slated to head south next weekend for invitationals - with the baseball team playing a triangular in Clintonville and the softball team playing twice in Denmark, located southeast of Green Bay.
"It's not looking very promising, but we'll keep calling around and see if we can find a field somewhere in southern Wisconsin in the next couple of weeks," Waksmonski said.
The RHS girls' soccer team has gotten creative in the past, scrimmaging indoors on a couple of occasions. Millot said he hasn't ruled out that possibility and added he is hoping to find a patch of grass and a team to play somewhere in the southern part of the state. "We keep all our options open, but right now nothing is set," he said.
Depending on how long the winter weather keeps up, that may need to be the mindset for the foreseeable future. According to the National Weather Service, the high temperature in Rhinelander will not climb above 40 until the middle of next week. The 6-to-10 day, 8-to-14 day and monthly temperature outlooks issued by the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction center all indicate a greater probability of below average temperatures this month.
Jeremy Mayo may be reached at [email protected].
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