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Winter weather hampers spring sports

by Matt Baldwin / Whitefish Pilot
| April 6, 2011 9:43 AM

There’s a good chance Whitefish’s

tennis teams will go to their first dual without ever serving a

ball on a regulation court. The softball team has yet to lace up

their cleats or field a fly ball, and the track team is still

hurdling mounds of snow.

Welcome to spring sports in Northwest

Montana.

Each of the high school sports teams

have been rotating practices in the gym since early March while

they wait for snow to melt in the valley. It’s a waiting game that

can set back a team’s progress, but it’s also one that’s widely

accepted as part of living in Whitefish.

“It’s part of Montana athletics,”

Whitefish activity director Jackie Fuller said. “This happens

almost every year.”

The gym has been in constant action,

with practices taking place from 6:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. nearly every

day. Early in the season, the coaches formulated a plan so all the

teams get a morning and evening practice.

Fuller is busy rescheduling games and

matches slated for this weekend in Whitefish. The Friday softball

game has been moved to Polson, and the tennis duals with Polson and

Bigfork will likely be moved as well.

“There’s a lot of working with other

athletic directors to make it work,” Fuller said.

The veteran coaches have been doing

their best to get their teams ready for the season. Boys tennis

coach Chris Schwaderer set up regulation nets in the gym and says

they’ve worked fairly well.

“Our focus has been on getting

repetition,” Schwaderer said. “They’ve been hitting the ball a lot,

maybe more than in a typical year. I think they’ll be ready to

go.”

With no lines on the gym floor,

Schwaderer said there could be some “psychological challenges” when

they take to the court for the first time.

The tennis and track teams joined

forces and tried to shovel snow from tennis courts at Riverside

Park in mid-March, but the knee-deep snow was too big of a job to

finish without a plow.

“We got out there with shovels for an

hour and got just about nothing done,” Schwaderer said. “We

literally shoveled just one path from the gate to the net.”

Early this month, high school custodian

Alan Dias made 40 trips around the running track and plowed 2-3

feet of snow. The team has been running, but the infield is still

covered shin-deep with snow in areas.

The softball team may have the most

difficult time overcoming the challenges of indoor-only

practices.

“We don’t get to field grounders off

the dirt, and we don’t get to catch fly balls,” coach Alan Compton

said. “The depth perception is totally different. It’s something

you can’t simulate.”

The Glacier Twins have been struggling

to get on the baseball diamond, too. Huge puddles have formed in

the Memorial Park outfield, and crews are using an industrial pump

to empty out an overflow tank beneath the field, coach Lindsay

Fansler said.

It’s been worse though. Fuller

remembers a very winter-like spring when the track team didn’t get

on the running oval until a week before divisionals in May.

“Some years we’re blessed, like last

spring when we didn’t cancel one thing,” Fuller said. “But the year

before that, we were running around like crazy.”