It is normally a time of high celebration when your kid is good enough of an athlete that colleges might give him or her a free four years in exchange for wearing their colors.
Yet, a conversation with a friend on this matter soon turned into discussion about isobars, big fish, little ponds, anticyclones, little fish, big ponds and the mixed bag that is April weather in the Midwest.
His boy is a shortstop who started as a sophomore and hit .500 for a team that went deep into the postseason playoffs, setting off a flurry of correspondence from college suitors.
By the next season, though, the phenom buzz started to wear thin. His kid got off to a slow start, and because a good chunk of the season was lost to bad weather, he wasn’t able to come close to matching his sophomore year stats. His stock as a hot prospect dropped, and suddenly my friend was once again looking at the possibility of college bills that he would have to foot.
“Darn this gosh-darn weather around here,” he said, approximately. “Four games they played, all of last April. That’s it. I might as well move to Arizona.”
High school athletes in Wisconsin who specialize in baseball, softball, golf or tennis in the spring get a bit cheated by the weather, compared to schools in warmer climes. The stud pitcher or infielder good enough to play college ball might never even get a sniff because of the truncated, weather-influenced schedule. There is a long line of quality baseball players from the north relegated to playing at junior college due to minimal exposure in high school.
Of course, there are geographic trade-offs wherever you are. The high school baseball player from Texas might play 40 games before summer league, compared to the 15 or so that teams typically play in Wisconsin. Then again, the guy from Wisconsin doesn’t have to check his spikes for scorpions before putting them on.
Baseball and softball in the cold are almost always not fun. Even when you hit one on the fat part of the bat, you will feel that numbing sting running from the hands all the way up the arms. Unlike football, where 22 players are moving on every play, baseball involves a lot of standing around and freezing between pitches.
Golf is just as bad in the cold, and maybe worse, because you know for a fact that you will be swinging and making contact at least 50 times. When every swing results in some degree of pain, eventually the swing becomes tentative, and tentative is no way to stand over a golf ball, or in the batter’s box.
I have played golf with guys whose idea of playing weather is anything above freezing. Writing for a golf magazine, I played with the assistant club pro at one of the courses the magazine was reviewing. It was April, but it was cold and windy, and it started to snow on the sixth hole. By the turn it had got so cold that the tips of my fingers turned white. By the 12th hole there had accumulated enough snow on the greens that every putted ball grew about 50 percent by the time it reached the hole, from the snowball effect.
“Should we maybe call it a day?” I offered, holding up the snow-enhanced Calloway as cause to pack it in.
“Nah, might as well finish,” the assistant pro said. “We’re playing golf in April. … If you can play in this, you can play in anything!”
The guy was known by his peers as hardcore, serious, die-hard. A true player, but this list of character traits didn’t seem complete without “psychotic.”
Maybe he’s just better adapted. Anyway, it could be worse here. In rainy England, they say, there is a day that is not an official holiday but is celebrated as one, where people revel in the balmy temperatures and sunshine, gathering in parks, enjoying music, games, food and general conviviality.
That day is known as summer.
Categories
