Wilson: Teams enjoy benefits of spring trips
High school sports followers and writers, and especially baseball and softball coaches, know not to take much of the April start to the spring sports schedule for granted.
This spring in particular, most teams in the Times Herald’s coverage area have been lucky to play one, maybe two games two weeks into April.
Big 30 softball teams taking southbound trips included Cattaraugus-Little Valley, Olean and Portville, all to Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Wellsville for a game in Crozet, Va.
Wellsville baseball coach Dennie Miles has organized southern trips for decades. This year, his Lions took a bus to Tampa Bay for a game against Berkeley Prep.
Miles said the idea of taking a team to Florida had been on his “bucket list.” In 42 years, his Lions have played 98 different schools through its most recent (and longest) spring trip.
“The idea was to fly ‘em and then we found out it was going to be $19,000 to fly a team to Florida,” Miles said. “We went, I guess that bucket list will be checked off but it’s going to be going by bus. It was a long haul, 26 hours on the bus coming home. But we checked it off and now I can say we took a team to Florida, and this was the team to do it. We’ve got a lot of kids coming back and Easter break was early, so that was the driving force behind it.”
Heather Kagelmacher, in her sixth year coaching softball at Cattaraugus-Little Valley, has taken the Timberwolves to Myrtle Beach the last five years. This year’s trip proved particularly helpful, given her team’s lack of outdoor practice before spring break.
“Typically we are able to get outside before we go down,” Kagelmacher said. “This year we actually hadn’t stepped foot on a field or our (football/soccer) turf, so we had no idea what we were going to see defensively. It was a little scary, but for being on the field for the first time as a full team, they played pretty good defense, which is what our goal is, to improve on that kind of stuff and get into those kind of situations.”
Though C-LV went 0-3 in South Carolina, its coach thinks the trip helped the T-Wolves get their “first-game jitters” out of the way.
“They seem to get nervous for the first game for some reason,” she said. “It’s not the first game of their career, but just to get that kind of stuff out and to go over some stuff that we needed to work on based off of what we saw last week, I think it makes them a little more comfortable.”
Olean High coach Dan Brooks said he started taking teams south while at Hinsdale, and his Huskies have gone to Myrtle Beach 11 times for the Grand Strand Softball Classic. His team had just 30 minutes of outdoor work fielding some pop flys before the trip.
“It was still pretty cold that day and I just didn’t want to risk injury that early or risk injury period,” Brooks said. “So we were leaving I think a day or two later and I decided that we’ll just stay inside until we get to Myrtle Beach and I think we had five practices down there and the six contests. But in the game of softball, you can’t simulate a pop fly in a gymnasium or a ground ball in the gym. You can’t hit a hard ball in a gym, the seams are too thick and they take bad bounces, so I use Softie toss balls in the gyms.”
OHS went 0-3 in the Grand Strand, but Brooks called it the “best year” his team has had in Myrtle Beach for development for young or inexperienced varsity players.
“It was probably, in my opinion, the best year that I’ve ever had there when it comes to where we were when we got there to where we were at the end of the week,” he said. “Just the progress, the confidence. Our first couple games down there were not pretty and we got beat, but in the whole scope of things, I’m not there to win or lose ballgames, I’m there to get my team ready for home.”
Brooks said players — or their parents — raise the money for trips, while the school typically pays for a bus and gas and this year paid the tournament entry fee. The Huskies rent out a house on their annual Myrtle Beach visits.
“I have chaperones that are part of the program and we spend the whole week together,” he said. “We cook for the kids, we spend probably the majority of the time together. A lot of parents come down and they spend time with their children. I have a parent night and then a big barbecue at the end to celebrate the week.”
While the team bonding can build camaraderie, Brooks said he’s had multiple OHS graduates tell him the trips also helped prepare them for their freshman dorm roommates.
“There’s nothing like it,” he said. “When they’re together in a house, they’ve got to learn to get along with each other in a different way. When we’re together after school for an hour and a half, two hours, they leave and go home, but now they’ve got to learn how to kind of tolerate each other in a bedroom that you’re sharing.
“The camaraderie and the team bonding that goes on, there’s no price tag for that.”
(Salamanca Press sports editor Sam Wilson may be contacted at swilson@oleantimesherald.com)
http://www.oleantimesherald.com/sports/wilson-teams-enjoy-benefits-of-spring-trips/article_a4b797be-405f-11e8-899c-63b52c84db72.html
Tidak ada komentar