What's wrong with High School sports, part 9,867

What is this spring football you speak of?

 

Baseball playoffs in Georgia are five rounds, best-of-three series in every round. Even with the first two games played as a DH, it is interminable. And God forbid it rains. (Which it always does.)

One school has graduation and can't play the makeup. Then the other school has graduation and can't play the makeup. Then it's a week later, you finally play the series and there's still three or four more rounds to go.

Competition-wise, it's preferable, because one-game baseball playoffs lend themselves to domination by a team with one good pitcher. But it. Goes. On. Forever.

 

high school spring football is the invention of the devil and totally, completely, irrevocably screws up the entire sports calendar. but the only people who will admit that are NOT football coaches.

 

No high school, anywhere, needs to spend one second or one dollar on spring football.

 

I always hate it when you have to sit through awards ceremonies. I'm trying to grab kids and coaches to interview after the game because I'm on deadline and people bitch because I'm interrupting their little ceremony, which is 10-15 minutes that I can't afford to wait.

The worst was one time I needed a list of the award winners to publish in the paper (this was a small-town paper where this was actually important). I ask the director for the list. He asks why I can't wait until after the ceremony, because it would be poor sportsmanship on my part to leave before the show ends. I told him that if I didn't get the list, it wouldn't run in the paper, because I wasn't going to blow deadline to watch a bunch of kids receive their little pieces of paper.

 

Florida's spring football practice is in May; baseball district tournaments concludes the first weekend of May.

That's right, Kentucky: We get all our high school sports out of the way before graduation. Try it someday.

Of course, baseball and softball start in February ... but it's ridiculous to have the postseason go over a month past the day some of those kids have graduated.

 

Reason No. 1 why I never minded picking the all-tournament team.

 

Winter sports pay the price....they're six weeks into the season before fall sports are done, at least some of them are.. and that's because spring sports have to be moved up to accommodate spring football.

 

In this case, it was all-league awards, and they also had all-academic honors for athletes, which we printed (like I said, small-town paper). The guy wanted me to twiddle my thumbs while all the awards were handed out. I usually would just grab the coach, or the stars, and take them off to the side to talk to them. But the guy kept complaining. Other sportswriters started to do the same thing, and the guy finally gave up.

 

You may wish to acquaint yourself with our weather down here. Spring starts early; so do spring sports.

And it's not accommodating spring football; it's accommodating the end of the damn school year.

 

Yeah, Georgia's the same way -- our baseball season always started around my birthday this month -- and weather has a lot to do with it.

Of course, all the basketball players on teams that go deep into the state tournament have to miss the first two weeks of baseball season because of the overlap. Just like some football players always have to miss a few Friday or Saturday games in the first month of basketball season if their team is still alive.

 

Well, if it wasn't for the fact our weather is unpredictable this time of year, our spring sports would be starting and we'd be finished before graduation.