April 22, 2011
For HS coaches, just getting on the field is a big victory
by Lenny Megliola/
Holliston (Mass.) High School faced a common sight last month: a snow-covered field. (photo: Keith Verra/Holliston High School)
Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the April 2011 issue of New England Baseball Journal.
There are hundreds of men in New England that try to do their jobs right. They’re ambitious, hard-working and honest. They serve society by being a big help to teenage boys. They’re not paid much.
All these men want to do is get outside and do their job. It’s just that they have women problems. Well, to be precise, the same woman.
Mother Nature.
This powerful dame is no friend to high school baseball coaches. She snows, she sleets, she rains on baseball diamonds. It’s not just that she makes the fields unplayable; occasionally you don’t even get to see them until the season opener!
“Sometimes the first day outside is the day of your first game,” said John Brown, Natick (Mass.) High School’s head coach in the mid-1990s.
Brown has since moved on and is the athletic director at Wellesley (Mass.) High. “We had a team from Maine come to Wellesley for a scrimmage because their field up there still had a foot of snow.”
Now, if your kid is a hockey or basketball player, no problem. He or she practices in a gym or rink. Doesn’t matter if there’s 3½ feet of snow outside. In September, a snowless month, football and soccer teams can practice on fields.
Baseball gets no favors.
“The biggest problem is mentally, when you’re looking at the snow and wondering if you’re ever going to get on your field,” said Don Fredericks, who coached Braintree (Mass.) High for 20 years before retiring in 2004. “Baseball is like no other sport.”
Dan Avery, the Framingham (Mass.) High coach, recalled a season-opening April game at Walpole. “It went into extra innings, and it snowed from the eighth to the 12th innings,” he said.
A baseball team trying to prep for the season in the school gym is “controlled chaos,” Avery said. “You’re trying to cut down to 18 players, and you’ve got 40 (to evaluate). I hate being stuck in the gym.”
“About all you can do in the gym is hit groundballs on the hard floor,” Fredericks said. Boring. “It’s false baseball.”
Then the AD screams that you’re scuffing up the basketball floor.
“It’s hard to develop what you have to do outside inside,” Fredericks said.
To get outside, teams will shovel snow from parking lots and just toss the ball around, no matter how cold it is. Ski gloves may be substituted for baseball mitts.
A dry parking lot enclosed in snow banks at least allowed Fredericks to hit popups. “You have to practice before you scrimmage. I tried to find a team that had a drier field than ours.” There is one thing a team can sort of simulate in the gym: “Pitching,” Fredericks said. “Just put your catcher 60 feet, 6 inches away.”
Holliston (Mass.) High coach Keith Verra remembered “a big snowstorm on April 1,” just days before the season opener. “We just expect to be indoors at that time of year.”
With so little time outdoors, teams line up scrimmages way ahead of time, hoping for the best.
“Coaches set up scrimmages every day because they know it’s going to rain or snow and you’ll to have to postpone them anyway,” Brown said. One year he took his team to the parking lot behind a skating rink. “We broke a window on one of the town trucks.”
Once, after a storm, Brown wanted his players to get some swings in at the batting cage located under the school library. “I thought we could get some work done. The batting cage was flooded. Unbelievable. Every year it’s something.”
OK, there are some teams that don’t have it so bad. Darren Sullivan is the coach of The Rivers School, a private school in Weston, Mass.
“We’ve gone south in the past, to West Palm Beach,” Sullivan said.
The team didn’t travel this year, but it’s still better off than most schools because the on-campus skating rink is turned over to a turf surface. “It’s great because we can have a full infield practice and a couple of outfielders.” Sullivan admitted public schools are “a little jealous.”
But once the team gets outside, “we’ve got to be creative,” Sullivan said. “The snow is melting, and you hope the wind will dry the field.”
Here’s the deal then. If you’re a high school coach in New England, “it’s a waiting game,” Fredericks said.
Lenny Megliola can be reached at feedback@baseballjournal.com
