Weather wreaking historic havoc on schedules

While historic numbers of inches of snow keep piling up, the winter season of 2014-2015 will be truly recognized as monumental.
When the MIAA announced last week it was pushing back the tournament qualifying dates for basketball and hockey teams it was the first time the organization had taken such measures. Ever.
Obviously, there have been winters where it has snowed — and snowed a lot — but the qualifying deadlines have always stood. Until this year.
“This is the first time in the history of the association that we have pushed back the cutoff dates,” Nathan Bonneau, media spokesman for the MIAA said when the change was announced. “The basketball deadline, which was Thursday, Feb. 19, has been pushed to Friday, the 20th.. The pairings will be done on Saturday the 21st.
“The ice hockey deadline was moved from Thursday to 3 p.m. on Saturday and the pairings will be done right afterwards, that afternoon and evening.”
The reason for the slight change and not a bigger one is that tournament venues, such as TD Garden in Boston, are locked in for certain dates and they can’t be changed. If the games can’t reach the scheduled round by those dates, they would have to move back to high school venues or available college sites.
That would deprive the high school players from getting a chance to perform on the largest stage, where the professionals play.
The sectional finals are scheduled for the weekend of March 7-8. The EMass Basketball (state semifinal) games between the North and South sectional champions for the boys and girls are scheduled for March 9-10 at TD Garden. The basketball state championships will be held in Worcester on March 14
The hockey finals are set for March 14-15 at TD Garden. In between the MIAA dates, the Garden is booked on March 11 and 13 with Celtics games and March 12 with a Bruins game.
In order to make certain that those dates are met, the MIAA has a little wiggle room in its schedule.
“The teams may have one open date between games instead of two,” Bonneau said. “There will be at least one open date after the pairings are announced.
“If we get two feet of snow on Sunday, there’s nothing we can do at that point. The basketball subcommittee meets the morning before the seeding and will talk with any schools that couldn’t complete their schedule. Some schools will be forced to make games ?no counts.’ Nobody would be penalized for not finishing their schedule as long as they have rescheduled games for the next available date.”
In the meantime, athletic directors are constantly scheduling and rescheduling games that have fallen victim to the weather. They have to contact bus companies, coaches, referees, newspapers and the people who work the games at the various schools. It goes on and on and on, but everybody’s in the same boat.
The timing of all the storms, in addition to the ferocity of them, has made it difficult to impossible to catch up. The three-week pounding coming as close to the end of the season as it has doesn’t leave much room to maneuver.
Two weekends ago, the Coaches Invitational track meet got moved from Saturday and ran the same time as the Elite Meet at the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center on Sunday.
Sunday’s Division 5 track meet fell victim to the blizzard. This sets up the New England High School Track Meet on Feb. 27 at the Lewis Center, which also plays host to the USA Track & Field Indoor National Championship from Feb. 27-March 1.Athletic directors and the MIAA do schedules, but a higher power does weather.