Nearly two months into the season, the Everett High School baseball team still hasn’t been able to hold a single practice on its field.
The dirt field’s notoriously poor drainage — combined with this spring’s exceptionally wet weather — has rendered it unusable.
For home games, the Seagulls have been forced to play on other turf fields in the area. And for practices, the team has been relegated to the school’s turf football field — that is, if it’s available. Some days, the team hasn’t been able to practice at all.
“We’ve never had anything close to this,” Everett coach Alex Barashkoff said of this spring’s weather. “And then we have our extraordinary circumstances with the (field), which causes it to be twice as bad.”
While Everett’s predicament is the extreme, baseball and softball teams across Snohomish County have been adversely affected by Mother Nature this season, as one of the wettest springs on record has wreaked havoc on schedules and robbed teams of considerable practice time.
“There is no season that compares to this — none,” Jackson baseball coach Kirk Nicholson said. “Until this month, we hadn’t been able to practice two days in a row on a field. We spent time in the gym and we tried to do as much stuff as we possibly could. But the truth is, you can’t simulate playing baseball. You just can’t.
“Our field drains pretty well, and we (still) haven’t had that many practices,” he added. “So I can only imagine some of the other (schools).”
Everett has had to make do with its football field, which is a significant limitation to begin with. But with the track and boys soccer teams also needing field time, sometimes the football field isn’t an option.
“When you’re into the season and you only get your two days (per week) to practice, and you miss one of those days — or both — due to no place to practice, that’s affected us,” Barashkoff said.
Barashkoff said the biggest challenge has been an inability to practice against live pitching, which is something Meadowdale baseball coach Bill Hummel can relate to. After his Mavericks managed just three runs combined in a two-game series against Edmonds-Woodway last week, Hummel mentioned that limited practice time has been a contributing factor in the team’s offensive struggles.
“I hate to search for excuses, but the weather has had such an impact on our ability to get good practices in,” Hummel said. “We look at the plate like we haven’t seen many breaking pitches this year. And truth be told, we haven’t. … We haven’t been able to simulate anything in practice.”
In addition to limited practice time, the inclement weather has caused a slew of rainouts. From day to day — and even hour to hour — it has been difficult to forecast whether a game will be played as scheduled.
“I’ve got a Doppler radar running on my laptop at work all day long,” Snohomish softball coach Lou Kennedy said. “You look at it and you’re like, ‘It’s barely missing here — maybe we can play.’ “
Kennedy said that four times this season his team has been riding a bus to the field, only to have the game rained out.
“It’s been hectic and chaotic,” Kennedy said. “You just never know.”
Consequently, scheduling has been a nightmare.
“Think about the secretaries in the offices that are having to change our games every day, and having to cancel buses and officials,” Nicholson said. “We have a couple of ladies that do that for us, and they have been pulling their hair out — it’s been so hard. So it isn’t just us that it affects.”
The numerous rainouts mean most teams will be playing a back-loaded schedule filled with makeup games over the final weeks of the regular season.
For instance, the Jackson baseball team is scheduled to play nine games in the next 15 days. That surely will test the Timberwolves’ pitching depth, especially with this season’s new pitch-count limitations.
“Hey, it means a lot of guys get to throw,” said the ever-optimistic Nicholson.
Of course, that’s assuming the upcoming weather allows for it.
“It can’t get much worse,” Kennedy said. “We’ll get (the games) done. We’re just going to have to squeeze them in somewhere.”
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