With dreams of line drives and double plays still buried beneath an uncommonly stubborn snowpack, Tim Peterson schedules workouts for the 9-year-olds on his Green Mountain baseball team in a small warehouse.
“I’ve had practices in parking lots before,” Peterson said. “You can be creative.”
Eager Colorado athletes, accustomed to an annual window of warm winter weather to begin thawing bats, legs and arms, don’t have a choice this year.
Stymied by nature’s wicked change-up, the boys and girls of summer – count softball, soccer and lacrosse players among them – already have seen tryouts postponed or scaled down and moved indoors.
Some municipalities have cautioned independent youth sports associations that they might need to adjust or shorten their seasons. For high schools, the scheduled Feb. 20 spring sports launch appears to be a pipe dream.
“They’ll have a chance to swing indoors, but they won’t see real practice fields until the snow is gone, and now it’s anybody’s guess,” said Bert Borgmann of the Colorado High School Activities Association. “Guys in Pueblo and southeast Colorado are usually already out there, doing informal workouts, but they’ve still got 2 1/2 feet of snow on the ground.”
Meanwhile, indoor workout facilities have had to expand hours, sometimes opening at 6 a.m. and keeping the lights on until midnight to meet demand.
On a recent bitter cold evening, Shane Fugita works with his eighthth-grade Dakota Ridge Eagles on the artificial turf at Slammers Baseball & Softball in Lakewood.
“Hit me in the chest, Nathan!” he urges a young catcher working on his throws in a tunnel draped with heavy-duty netting.
Thwack! The ball smacks into Fugita’s mitt, but the sound doesn’t echo with springlike promise so much as it dies against the walls.
The team usually practices outside on a privately owned field by the second week in January and then works around the occasional here-and-gone spring snowfall.
Indoors confining
But now, unable to get outside at all, Fugita’s squad toils in close quarters under artificial light. The baseball equivalent of cabin fever has the coach thinking about hopping on an ATV to drag the outdoor practice field – if only to break up snow in hope that it melts more quickly. Maybe he could hire a small front-end loader to move the deep stuff.
“It’s been horrible,” said Fugita, who can’t remember weather this confounding in his 13 years of coaching. “If you’ve got a Little League team like mine, you’re really in trouble. We’ve got no gym, we can’t practice outside and the indoor facilities cost money.”
Indoor workouts have long augmented the preseason schedules for competitive youth teams, but this year they’ve become essential.
At Slammers, teams have reserved weekend slots throughout February for tryouts, prompting the 40,000-square-foot facility to stretch its hours, general manager Robbie Carson said.
“Bad weather is good for us,” he said. “A couple years ago, teams were outside in the middle of January and February. But that’s Colorado weather for you.”
At the year-old public indoor arena at the Daniel L. Schaefer Athletic Complex near West Hampden Avenue and South Kipling Street, the usual 3 to 9 p.m. prime-time hours on weekdays now stretch to midnight.
But while indoor locations hum like a Roger Clemens fastball, large municipal facilities could end up striking out financially. At Foothills, for instance, outdoor complexes are booked solid every weekend from March through October with tournaments, and every lost weekend equals lost revenue.
The Brighton Youth Baseball Association normally schedules its tryouts – outdoors – for the second week in February. The contingency plan calls for moving them back a week.
After that, it’s all indoors.
And it can be difficult to get an accurate read on a kid under those conditions, said association president Rick Lane.
“But we’re all in the same boat. Get indoors. Hit. Pitch. Get the chalkboard out and draw up situations,” Lane said. “Tryouts, it’s going to hurt. It’ll be unfair to some kids. But every organization is doing the best they can.”
In Aurora, officials recently told five independent baseball and soccer leagues, as well as in-house programs that use nearly 100 outdoor game and practice locations, that the scheduled Feb. 19 opening isn’t likely.
Because snow must be fully melted before grounds crews even consider releasing the fields, the city isn’t making any promises.
“We warned them that you might want to scale your season back, or look at scheduling doubleheaders if it’s nice, or give refunds on registrations,” said Rose Williams, senior recreation supervisor for Aurora. “At this point, we’re not comfortable that they’ll get a whole season in.”
Adult softball leagues get under way Feb. 26, but Williams added that she’s not too optimistic about that date either.
“Our parks guys look at the weather models daily and weekly, and it’s not looking very favorable to the second and third week of March,” she said.
“Unless there’s a huge heat wave,” she added.
In Douglas County, parks director Ron Benson doesn’t rule that out.
“Even with this much snow, we know that in February – unless this trend continues – that the temperature will jump up, because it always does,” said Benson, whose natural turf fields are scheduled to remain idle until at least mid-March. “Then you get the Chinook winds, the old snow-eater, and it goes quick.”
Douglas County has begun a conversion to synthetic turf with a half-dozen fields, but six weeks and counting of snow cover has put a dent in winter rental revenue because policy prohibits plowing for fear of damaging the surface.
Snowblower a no-go
Park rangers recently had to shoo some eager lacrosse players off the county’s Bayou Gulch fields when they brought their own snowblower to clear practice space.
According to the National Weather Service, the 30-day outlook for February suggests slightly above-normal temperatures and precipitation. The average high temperature runs about 47 degrees while average snowfall comes in at just over 6 inches.
Sunday marks 46 consecutive days of measurable snow cover in Denver.
“We’re starting to get a bit concerned,” said Mary Rowzee, office manager for the Jefferson County Junior Baseball League. “We still have to proceed as we normally do with our timetable, but I’m looking out my office window in Wheat Ridge and see 6-foot piles of snow in the parking lot. With these temperatures, it’s not going anywhere.”
Amid the fretting over scheduling problems, everyone seems to agree that the snow cover has insulated fields from winter wear and tear and, with a slow, quenching melt, could ultimately put facilities in excellent shape.
But the first youth baseball tournament looms just a month away, and everyone’s eyeing the weather report with an interest normally reserved for scoreboard watching during a pennant race.
“We’re at the mercy of the weather patterns,” said Thad Anderson of Fort Collins-based Triple Crown Sports, which sanctions baseball, softball and soccer tournaments nationwide. “But we haven’t gone to the level of scheduling Xbox virtual games just yet.”
