Some local sporting groups wish they had the power to turn on some sunshine.
The slow arrival of spring has forced Lacombe Minor Baseball indoors, hosting tryouts in area gyms, potentially practices soon, ahead of a season that starts the first week of May.
While Association Vice President Darcy Warawa notes last year they held most of their tryouts outside around this time, they're making due, and an indoor start is better than no start to the season.
“You do deal with a little bit of space constraints depending upon the size of the gymnasium we’re able to access, but to be honest with you, if we’re able to run kids into a variety of stations, utilize things such as wiffle balls for hitting, which are a plastic ball we’re able to use in the gymnasium, we’re still able to accomplish what we would outdoors from a practice stand point”.
Warawa says they are a bit nervous around how long it will take for fields to be ready for play, but the weather is out of their control.
“It’s still going to take a period of time once the snow disappears for the fields to even dry out for us to be able to get on them and obviously for the city to do just some basic maintenance at the start of the year right. Honestly, even if the weather does warm up here in the next few weeks, it’s probably going to be that last week of April, potentially the first week in May before we can start stepping on diamonds”.
Lacombe Minor Ball has experienced great growth in registrations in recent years, especially in their rally cap and rookie programs which have more than doubled in the last 3 years, and for the 1st time in 3 years Lacombe will be fielding a Mosquito AA team.
The City of Red Deer meantime is reminding residents to stay off the fields for the coming weeks; they are expecting all sports fields to open later than May 1st this year.
Wed, Apr 17, 7:00 PM
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