| Towers Field on the campus of the University of Rochester was still covered with snow as February ended. d3photography.com photo by Ryan Coleman |
By Danny Niehaus
for D3baseball.com
In typical late February fashion, the blistering cold, and snow filled weather conditions have taken games out of the control of players and coaches alike. Instead, at an alarming rate, teams across the country have had letters “PPD” plastered across their schedules. Currently, it seems the only measure to keep an arm loose is to engage in an all-out snow ball war. After all, many college students need a snow plow just to escape their dorm rooms, much less complete a nine inning game.
The cumulative effect of the weather early this season is yet to be determined. Entering the weekend, eleven teams in the 2015 D3baseball.com Top 25 have yet to hear “play ball”. This early stretch of non-conference games is typically used by coaches for experimentation. Often, it is where the batting order is crafted, rotations are set, and chemistry is born.
For teams like Cortland State, the perennial top dog in the New York Region, that has to wait. The defending regional champions, and fifth ranked team in the 2015 D3baseball.com Preseason Top 25, are one of those teams to have yet had an opponent.
“This year has been challenging but at the same time it's allowed us to really fine tune all important components of our game, such as team defense and bunting,” said Cortland head coach Joe Brown. “We have also had the chance to do some team functions, which have been lots of fun.”
“I have enjoyed more practice time and hopefully that proves to help us when we play,” said Brown. We will see how the Red Dragons respond to the extra practice when they take on Johns Hopkins on Friday March 6. The Blue Jays, looking to improve on their 2014 record, have also had all three of their scheduled games postponed this year.
Other teams, such as Bridgewater (Va.), have enjoyed a small taste of the good life. The Eagles, ranked 20th in the D3baseball.com Top 25, were 1-0 when the snow started to fall. However five games in the last two weeks of February have been postponed, or canceled altogether. "We've never lost this many games this early in the season,” said Bridegewater head coach Curt Kendall. “At least when you lose games this early you have a chance to replace some games. When you lose non-conference games midyear due to rain, it's hard to make those up."
| The results of baseball practice for the Methodist Monarchs in late February. Photo by Stephen Nails |
One challenge that faces teams like Bridgewater is keeping the team focused. "We have a young team this year so we're spending time working on fundamentals,” said Kendall. "We do a lot of individual work and we try to simulate live situations through cage games."
On March 2, the Eagles finally got back to competition, but on nearby James Madison’s baseball diamond against non-conference opponent Messiah. "Getting back out there and playing Messiah was huge for us," said Kendall. We're young, so we need games to see how our young guys are going to react in game situations."
"It was really important for us to get two games vs. Messiah, especially since we begin conference play this weekend against a very good Randolph-Macon squad. I didn't want to start conference without getting a couple of games in. We were fortunate we had a facility available at James Madison University and we were fortunate to get a good day of weather. I feel better going into a conference weekend with a couple of games under our belts."
If the current weather trend continues, many teams may not see consistent action until the bus is fired up and heads south for Spring Break.
“There have been other challenging years, such as the blizzard of 1993, and the cold weather last year,” said Brown. “The biggest issue quite honestly is that everyone has pushed up the schedule earlier, so the pressure to play earlier is enormous. Everyone needs to take a deep breath and things will get better.”
As a former Division III baseball player at Transylvania University, I always found myself amidst a love/hate relationship with this portion of the season. Some days there are not enough hand warmers and hooded sweatshirts in this world to stay warm throughout a double header. That being said, there are only so many ground balls one can field off the gymnasium floor before the claustrophobia sets in. For the player’s sake, let’s hope the weather breaks, the mounds of snow melt off the tarp, and the pitch and catch begins.