No good weather yet for spring sports

Recently, Havre was singled out by the Weather Channel as having the worst winter in the United States of America. Truthfully, it has been terrible and the impact on spring sports has been unprecedented.

"In the spring, you are definitely going to have cancellations and different things," HHS activities director Dennis Murphy said. "But starting the year off with all of these cancellations is new for me."

While spring sports have been underway for a few weeks now, the Havre High track and softball teams haven't been able to practice at their normal venues yet. Both the softball field and the track have been covered in snow. And just when it looked like the Blue Pony softball team would get to play on an actual field in the Great Falls Invitational last Friday, the tournament was canceled due to weather. The Cal Wearley Track meet, which was supposed to take place this Thursday at the Havre Middle School track, was moved back to April 18. That's still in doubt, as is the April 14 Havre Lions Track meet.

"The thing about canceling things at the beginning of the year is that you try to find dates to reschedule," Murphy said. "But it becomes very difficult. Non-essential events won't be rescheduled in some cases. You take a sport like tennis, where nothing is really essential until tournament time, but you certainly want to plan as many matches as you can for your student athletes. Same thing for track and field. But you also want to make sure that when you do put them out there, there is at least some decent weather."

Unfortunately, Murphy said a lot of what happens will be dictated by the weather and cold temperatures are forecasted for the week ahead. If the weather is good, things could start being played as scheduled, but if there is more moisture, expect even more events to be canceled.

"We have to rely on mother nature for a lot of things," Murphy said. "We need some warmth and the long-range forecast for the next 10 days doesn't look really warm for us. So we need some help, we need some warmth so that things will dry out. The softball field had a great thaw last week, but unfortunately it's pretty saturated with water and the track still has some pretty big (snow) drifts on it."

The other alternative laid out by Murphy, if the weather fails to cooperate, is seeking out other venues for sporting events, even if it means traveling out of town.

"One of the things we will be doing if we continue to get this weather is looking for venues that we can get to," Murphy said. "Because when your kids practice, now we are at three weeks for some of them, without any competition in sight, that's hard on an athlete, too, and hard on your spring coaches who have waited all year for their sports to begin."

The sport that is in the best shape is tennis and a big reason for that is a lot of the work done by players, coaches and volunteers to clear snow off the tennis courts. However, more snow this week could put Saturday's Havre Invitational in jeopardy. The Havre Lions Track meet is April 14 and the Havre softball team is scheduled to be at home April 20. In the end, all the events could go off without a hiccup, but it truly is all up to the weather.

"We are hoping," Murphy said. "The Lions Track meet is two weeks away and that is going to be tight based on forecasts. It's all a crapshoot. If we had 50 degree weather I don't think there would be a problem. But we are looking at 20s and all that is going to do is slow us down and push us back another week. It's really frustrating, it's frustrating for the coaches to have all these setbacks caused by weather. I guess when you are ranked the worst city in the country for weather, there is a reason for that."