Inside the Cupboard
Spring Break has come and gone with no negative issues that have surfaced, which is always a good thing.
School will be back in session tomorrow for four days before students, staff and teachers will be out Friday in celebration of Good Friday.
Saturday morning, 50 teams will take the fields in Sneads and Marianna for their opening day.
My prayer and sincere wishes are that both leagues are as crowd pleasing and pure joyous as the first opening day, which was actually an opening night in Cottondale a couple of weeks ago.
The park was packed and there was nothing but good vibes throughout the evening. With that many rec ball teams (not including the other towns), you can imagine my anxiety level of getting stats, info, and pictures from all the games and then get them written for next week’s paper!
In my most positive voice, “I have a plan.” Of course, many may say I need to change that to a dream because it’s not going to happen, but I am going to do my dead-level best to make it happen. I had 100% reporting from 13 teams in Cottondale on their opening day so I’m challenging Marianna (Optimist Park) and Sneads (SRA) to make it happen for their respective teams.
And of course, middle and high school baseball/softball is still active as can be – which brings me to my next point of discussion (rant).
Testing is of the utmost importance according to our fearless leaders in Tallahassee. So maybe those fearless leaders need to make a visit to the schools to stress that the ALL aspects of the school.
I’m not sure how many days testing is scheduled for this week, but I know it is on Wednesday. So, why can’t we not schedule our games accordingly.
Students (even your best ones, even your star athlete ones) do not need to be traveling the night before testing for a ballgame and getting home at 10, 11, and even as late as midnight.
Schools have a chain of command that needs to be actively working with this particular issue.
IF a coach schedules games (unbeknown to him/her testing is the following day at the time the games are scheduled), then your athletic director needs to be addressing postponing that game.
If the athletic director fails to act, you have assistant principals and principals that I am pretty sure one of them represents the school at games so they are aware of the testing and should react and make the decision to postpone and if that’s not possible, to cancel.
And while I’m getting in their business, four games a week is a little excessive too. I don’t know of many baseball teams who have enough arms on the mounds to schedule four games. And that, my readers, is my take from Inside the Cupboard this week.