With the approach of Spring, it has become difficult for spring sport athletes to find times and places to practice.

I would know. I play volleyball in the fall. I always knew we would have practice in the Main Gym at 4:00. Outdoor sports were outdoors and they only came inside if the field wasn’t playable. On occasion we had to move practices on Saturdays if some event was happening in the school. Spring is different though.

There are eight spring sports and five of which play outside. Unfortunately, with try-outs and practices starting the first week of March, there is still snow on the ground and all eight sports are forced to find space to practice inside.

My softball team has practices before school, right after school, and late at night (around 6:30). Not knowing what time we are going to practice is frustrating.

Morning practices aren’t fun, by the end of the day you are beyond exhausted from being up since five in the morning for 5:45am practice.

Multiple teams take matters into their own hands and shovel. Baseball and tennis were two teams that did it. Softball was planning to do it but the day we planned to shovel it was warm enough that most of the snow melted.

With the weather warming up, we can go outside now, but our field still has some snow and now that most of it has melted our field is a giant puddle. Don’t even get me started on the outfield. Instead of getting to go practice on our field we go to the school parking lot. Sometimes the baseball team is outside with us, so we have to go to a different parking lot to practice. Even though we are outside, we are still very limited to what we can do.

The only place that we can go right now that would have enough room for our outfielders to practice their throws is the football field. Finding times for this is hard too because girls soccer and track and field use the field right after school so we have late practices under the lights or morning practices.

I don’t know how much the school can do to accommodate the spring sports teams, but I do know that the head coaches for the teams have multiple meetings so practice spaces and times are fair.

We got lucky with the weather this year; we can already go out on the field. Last year we weren’t so lucky, many of our first games were cancelled because it was too cold to play and we had to practice inside for multiple weeks, sharing the limited space. Regardless, spring is a hectic time where practice spaces and times are irregular and dependent on the weather.