The calender says the Vernal Equinox is at 12:15 p.m. Tuesday. That’s when the sun shines directly on the equator, and the days and nights are of equal length.
It’s also the official first day of spring, but this year, as in others lately, that’s a matter of who you ask. Meteorologically speaking (at least according to the TV guys), spring begins March 1.
In high school sports, it begins the day after the winter tournaments end. That would be today.
But all you have to do is look out the window to see that someone forgot to tell winter to go away.
“I’m looking out the window as I drive,” said Classical baseball coach Mike Zukowski, “and there’s got to be a 4-foot snowbank in front of me.”
Zukowski, like just about every coach, will spend the next few weeks trying to keep his players focused and conditioned as they chomp at the bit to go outdoors.
“The gym gets kind of monotonous,” said Zukowski, whose Rams won the Northeastern Conference last season. “I’ll have to find ways to mix it up. We’ll probably go to Extra Innings, or that Route 1 sports complex. Try to change the scenery a little bit. There are only so many drills you can do before you lose interest.”
His softball counterpart, Erica Richards, agrees.
“There are a lot of things that get affected,” she said. “You can’t hit fly balls to the outfielders because you’re limited by the ceilings in the gym. There’s no mound, so you’re not pitching off the surface you’ll be pitching from in a game.
“There’s only so much you can do,” she said.
Lynnfield baseball coach John O’Brien, a veteran of the North Shore baseball coaching scene, shrugs his shoulders with a “what-can-you-do-about-it” attitude.
“I coached in Winchester and a couple of other places and we were shoveling the fields off,” he said. ‘I’m not expecting to do that. You just have to figure that unless you get lucky, you’re indoors for a week. If you get outside, it’s a bonus.”
Nevertheless, O’Brien says he’s scheduled scrimmages for the end of the week “but I don’t see them happening at this point, especially if they’re talking about more snow this week (forecasters haven’t zeroed in on how bad — if at all — the projected storm coming up the coast will be).”
Zukowski, too, has set up scrimmages, “but they’re not happening,” he said.
Another coach who can’t see getting riled up over the weather is Jon Gold, Marblehead’s softball coach. As far as he’s concerned, the Magicians will take it as it comes.
“We’ve faced this before,” said Gold. “It happened three years ago too.
“The biggest problems is you’re in the gym for another week,” he said. “Three years ago, when we had that terrible winter, the first time we got on a field was our first game. We don’t know what’s going to happen this week. But we’ll be OK. I’m not worried. If you have to push the start of the season back, then push it back. We’ll take what comes. I’ve always said that coaching either baseball or softball in New England is the toughest of all sports. You have weather, proms, graduations to work around. It can get difficult. You have to make the best of it.”
Both Zukowski and O’Brien say the toughest part of being confined to gyms and batting cages is timing.
“At some point, you have to see live pitching,” said Zukowski. “You have to field a ball off a live bat. You have to be able to track fly balls outdoors. If worst comes to worst, we’ll go into the parking lot for that. But this can really set you back.”
Last year, Zukowski said, winter stayed late too. It got so bad that the Rams played a scrimmage in the pouring rain just to get outdoors.
“It was really coming down,” said Zukowski, “and nobody cared. We were just happy to be outside.”
O’Brien says the Pioneers have a good hitting facility that was built when Steve McBride coached at Lynnfield. He also makes sure his players do weight-lifting while waiting for the chance to get on the field.
“We make use of the gym,” he said. “We do a lot of throwing … a lot of ground balls. We have three indoor mounds to keep us going.”
O’Brien says protecting arms is a big concern. Zukowski agrees.
“I don’t know why the seasons are so close together,” Zukowski said. “You have a lot of players coming winter sports, and they have to get their arms built up. You get an injury and you’re out for two weeks youre talking about six games.”
One coach who won’t have to worry too much is St. John’s Prep’s Dan Letarte.
“Our turf is plowed,” said Letarte. “We’re ready to go. We just have to be careful with arm issues. And wind chills. They can say it’s 45 degrees, but you get a cold win, and it feels way worse. If it’s really brutal, we don’t throw.
“There are days where 5 o’clock comes and it’s ‘see you later and into the cars.’
St. John’s also plays in a wood-bat league (Catholic Conference) and Letarte acknowledges that the sting of a ball hit on the wrong spot on a wood bat, on a cold day, can hurt very much.
“The first two weeks we hit with metal bats,” he said. “Then, we’ll start with the wood. Week 1 is usually a brutal week. Last year we had wind chills down to 18.”
