March 18, 2007
I could tell from the tone in my father's voice that he was not pleased. It was a pitch well above annoyance, but not quite anger.
I was speaking with him this past Saturday morning, and the cause of his angst was 10 inches of snow on the driveway of his suburban Boston home. The bottom three inches of the dumping was comprised of a dense, Slurpee-like slush, although this flavor won't be found at your nearest 7-Eleven.
My father is no stranger to grim New England weather. With a couple of brief interludes, he has endured the majority of the past 72 Beantown winters with a strong back, a well-oiled snowblower, and a gallows humor. But this storm took its toll psychologically because my father truly believed winter, or at least any kind of meaningful snowfall, was over.
In the current meteorological and political climate, every warm December weekend or March snowfall is viewed as a referendum on global warming, and it's easy to make sweeping generalizations with the relatively small data sample we have at our disposal. Accentuating the belief that this weekend's snow was an anomalous event, I heard a host on the Weather Channel refer to it as a `freak storm.'
Freak storm? Is Boston the new Miami? It's mid-March in New England. This is not a freakish occurrence.
The fact is my father convinced himself -- or just simply hoped -- that spring had arrived. Considering the amount of his own empirical data, he should have known better.
And he is not alone.
Lacrosse schedules across the region were littered with `ppd' and `ccd' -- ugly abbreviations testifying to the hubris of schedule-makers in the Snow States. In total, 15 men's games were either canceled or postpoined, in addition to another 18 women's games. A handful of contests on both sides delayed their start times on Saturday to make amends for the white stuff.
It used to be Northern coaches would schedule a couple of games down south, typically on spring break when they could shoe-horn three or four games into a week span, and then return to the region in early April for the home opener. The grass wasn't completely green, but the frost line was gone.
This year, Springfield and Endicott had the gall to schedule a game in Beverly, Mass., on Feb. 27. Sure, they managed to pull it off, but talk about thumbing your nose at Mother Nature.
The primary reason for so much northern confidence in early season games lies with artificial turf. Once a surface boasted only by a chosen few colleges and universities in the region, synthetic field turf has become as ubiquitous on campuses as illegal music downloads and nutty, left-wing professors. Even if an institution doesn't have an artificial field on campus, it's likely there is one within an hour's drive.
Turf is now viewed as a safety net for schedulers. No longer is the weather a variable, rather it's just a potential nuisance. You can almost hear the arrogance of a March 17 home game said with an Antionette-esque disdain. "Let it snow, we can just plow the fields!" or "Our facilities have excellent drainage!"
And then along comes seven inches of snow on top of three inches of slush, and the coaches scurry to the sports information director's office for the bailout -- "Um, we're postponing the game. Can you put something on the web?"
There is a tendency for athletic administrators and coaches to fall into the same trap that some of my colleagues do: an inability to think critically. The turf revelation combined with a couple of mild springs doesn't equate to an invitation to schedule haphazardly. There must be some thought put into worst case scenarios and consequences.
It is postulated that it will take another ice age to negate the supposed ills affecting our environment, and then everything will magically return to normal. Hopefully this weekend's storm will act as a mini-apocolypse for the gurus scheduling games north of Philly, and be kept as a constant reminder that lacrosse is not a year-round sport.
Judging by his reaction, my father won't need to be reminded again.
Contact Jac Coyne at jcoyne@uslacrosse.org.
