host posted on September 14, 2009 03:52
The North Jefferson News
You can imagine how officials at Tabernacle Christian School felt Friday morning when they got a phone call from Gardendale Park and Recreation, telling them the football field that their Torches normally use at Moncrief Park would not be available Friday night.
If the opponent was just coming from across town or even a county away, it probably would not have been a big deal. But the opponent on Friday was Victory Christian, coming in all the way from Columbus, Mississippi.
That’s a different matter altogether.
So TCS tried to find another site. Fultondale High? No, sorry. How about the now-closed Garywood Christian School in Hueytown (longtime employer of yours truly?) Can’t do, as the field is being used by a youth football association now and it’s already set up for them. Mortimer Jordan? Only if it doesn’t rain, and we know what it did pretty much all day Friday.
So, as a last resort, the teams finally agreed to move the game to Columbus. It took a while to round up a crew of officials, and they had to move the kickoff to 8 p.m. to give Tabernacle time to get over to Victory.
I have learned over the years that high school sports schedules are not set in stone, by any means. Small private schools can be most vulnerable, as they sometimes use facilities that don’t belong to them, and at the mercy of those who operate them.
Football is usually the most secure, but storms this time of year can mess things up. I covered a game last year for another local newspaper at Jess Lanier which was stopped in mid-snap because of lightning. The referee, a friend of mine, had to keep delaying the game a half hour at a time because the storm simply wasn’t moving. He finally suspended the game until the next day. Not a big problem, because the opponent was Midfield, just a few miles away.
Occasionally a Friday game will be moved up to Thursday for various reasons. Birmingham city schools, most of whom play at Legion Field or Lawson Field, are notorious for this. One instance was another game I was supposed to cover at Jackson-Olin (which has its own field now) with Paul Bryant. They moved the game to Thursday without telling the media, which meant I drove up to the stadium only to see a lone jogger on the track. I was hastily reassigned to a game at Brookwood.
Sometimes, the game may remain, but the opponent may change, or even be added to the festivities. A case in point was Thursday’s volleyball match with Fultondale at Corner. When the Wildcats arrived, they found out that Midfield had been added to make it a tri-match. “I didn’t know we were playing Midfield until I got here,” said Fultondale coach Melanie Gearhart.
Another time I was assigned to cover a scheduled baseball doubleheader at Clay-Chalkville. When I got there, it turned out that the schedule had been changed to a “tournament” with four different teams.
Often this last-minute arrangement is done in sports in which the Alabama High School Athletic Association allows teams to play a limited number of dates. I emphasize that word because “dates” does not necessarily equate to games. Sports such as volleyball, baseball and softball often play multiple games on a single day, such as doubleheaders, tri-matches and invitational tournaments. This is sometimes done to minimize travel, but more often it’s to get around the AHSAA limit.
That’s why you will see softball and volleyball teams play many more games than the state limit. Jordan, for instance, played more than 50 games in last year’s state championship softball season, including post-season play, even though the limit is 18 games and seven weekend tournaments.
And in volleyball, perennial power Huntsville High has already played more than 20 games, even though the limit is 15 dates, because tri-matches count as only one date and tournaments do not count at all.
All this is to say that sports writers who concentrate on high schools must learn to be flexible, because what the schedule says and what actually gets played are often two different things, even with the large, highly-organized schools.
And I’ll keep repeating this to myself over and over, as I leave in a few minutes for Gardendale’s game all the way over at Oak Mountain, instead of Tabernacle’s just down the road.