Rain may not have affected Plant City area teams’ ability to start their kick-off classic games last Friday night, but a whole lot of other schools weren’t so lucky.
Plenty of Hillsborough and Pinellas county schools decided to skip that Friday night, or maybe postpone until the following day. Manatee County’s athletic department went ahead and put the kibosh on everything several hours before anyone would have kicked off. Sarasota schools also spent much time mulling over game status decisions.
It’s not like this hasn’t happened before, but you all know as well as I do that this year’s summer rainfall has been bonkers compared to that of the last few years. It’s not like it’s going to get any better anytime soon, either, what with hurricane season’s peak coming right up. It’s affecting games and practices alike.
It’s time to reconsider August football.
I mean, what good does it do anyone if everyone has to cancel or reschedule contests because it rains hard enough for half of the fields in any given county to become unplayable in a day or two? Plant City has already had enough problems with its own city-operated sports parks having to cancel all events for three of the last four weekends. I can’t imagine anyone’s high school football field is really that much better, if you could really call it better without lying, than what the City of Plant City has. And we have some of the best-kept playing fields in the whole county at our parks.
I’m ready for whatever out there. I’ve gotten my Nikon camera so wet that I don’t even know how or why it still works. Rainy football photos are cool. Mike and Jess Eng, editor and graphic designer emeritus of the Plant City Observer, often encouraged me to try and get them whenever there was no lightning around to threaten the game. But there’s a difference between a lighter drizzle making your scene of a running back breaking a tackle look as cool as the ending of The Natural and a torrential downpour making it impossible to see what the heck is going on. That’s just my own selfish reason, not one that’s gonna get taken into account if my testimony’s ever used in an argument heard in front of the FHSAA board, but I might as well put it out there for an additional perspective.
Any team can turn into an outfit of 1930s leatherheads when the rain hits hard enough, which it certainly has been lately. Everyone’s just sloshing through the mud, trying not to slip and roll an ankle or get hurt even worse. All you can do is call running plays for, like, 90 percent of the game anyway. Then you have to keep an eye out for lightning more so than usual. Then you’re just sitting there wondering how soon until you’ll hear that the game has been postponed until the following day when, hopefully, both teams and the field can be ready to go when the skies look a bit better — and that, hopefully, lasts for the whole rest of the game. I’m too young to enjoy 1930s football. I would bet all or most of you are, too.
To paraphrase Patrick Star, we should take the start of football and push it somewhere else.
Where’s the harm in having the preseason in early September, as early as the first week or as late as the second? There might still be rainouts, sure, but the odds of you losing nothing but that one preseason game are greater than having it in mid-August like now and putting the first third to first half of your action in peak rainy season.
If we finish the regular season in mid-November instead of the first week, is it a bad thing? You run into the problem of extending football deeper into December, but think of the sport we’re dealing with here. I really don’t think it matters when you play high school postseason football — as long as you are playing it, people will come. This sport is not threatened by a lack of spectators.
Will we ever see the start dates pushed back? I’m not so sure. But if the powers that be ever want to do us a solid and keep everyone from traveling to games by canoe, I’ll be equal parts happy and dry.