Bayfield, Durango and Ignacio High School track and field teams will have to wait two more days for a shot at a state title.
An ongoing snowstorm prompted the Colorado High School Activities Association to postpone and cut down the state track and field championships to a two-day Saturday and Sunday meet. The storm dropped several inches of snow on the track at Jefferson County Stadium in Lakewood and the poor conditions are expected to continue through Friday.
According to a CHSAA news release, the track committee didn’t expect the snow to come this early and conditions were too unsafe for competition. State baseball playoffs have also been affected by the storm.
“While I appreciate CHSAA’s efforts to figure out a solution, the fact that it took half a day to redraft a schedule is representative of how unprepared they were even though the forecast has been predicting this weather for a week,” Durango head coach David McMillan said. “There should have been a plan B that considered the schools that had to travel. Sometimes I think these decisions are made by people on the Front Range with little consideration or empathy for the outlying districts.”
According to McMillan, Durango High School is wasting $2,000 to kill time for the next two days, and that’s just the start of the issues. Some of the team members were forced to skip a session of AP testing that could have been completed Thursday. McMillan tried to convince the committee to consider running the 3,200-meter run Friday night after the weather is supposed to clear the area. This would have allowed the Demons and other far-away teams to leave early in the afternoon Sunday. The request was denied, which means the teams will have to leave late Sunday evening and won’t arrive home until the wee hours of the morning. Final exams begin Monday at DHS.
The DHS coach feels like something could have been done to ease the financial and educational impacts brought on by an imminent weather system that was predicted to hit the area several days ago.
“I know they were looking at the same weather forecasts as I was,” McMillan said. “Even if we give the forecasters a bit of wiggle room and it was 42 degrees and rain, they’re not going to send a pole vaulter out there to compete in conditions like that. If they would have just trusted the professionals and made the announcement Tuesday when it was clear that the storm was heading this way, it could have saved a lot of money and hassle.”
The committee had an idea that a weather system was heading into the region, as it published a Tuesday article stating CHSAA has no option but to move ahead as scheduled. According to the article, the committee felt that the size and scale of the event made any pre-postponement unworkable.
“We don’t have other viable options than to move ahead as planned,” CHSAA commissioner Paul Angelico said in Tuesday’s CHSAANow article. “We have to get as many events in as we can, when we can. We don’t want teams spending a week in Denver trying to get this done. We understand there are lots of year-end activities, as well as finals, that schools will be experiencing. CHSAA policy is that we always play on the next available date.
“We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause schools, but with more than 200 schools participating, there’s no way to avoid conflicts.”
Now that these conflicts have happened, several changes have been implemented to get the meet finished in the two-day window. The running events will be transitioned into timed finals without preliminaries. Preliminaries will also be absent from throwing and jumping events. Competitors will have four attempts and all will be finals. Pole vault and high jump starting heights may be adjusted and other changes are possible.
With the new schedule of events including longer gaps between some races, McMillan hoped to enter some of his qualifiers into events that were previously too close in succession to run. For example, DHS freshman Madeleine Burns qualified for the 3,200 but wasn’t going to participate because of a narrow two-hour gap until she was scheduled to compete with the championship-contending 4x800 team. The revised schedule after the delay lengthened the gap to five hours, but Burns won’t be allowed to re-enter.
“They won’t allow the kids to run in the events they qualified for,” McMillan said. “The short turnaround forced us to do that originally, but now that the situation is completely different, Madeleine wants to compete and they won’t let her. Sometimes the lack of flexibility and rational thinking in these decisions reflect that there’s a chip or two missing in the hard drive.”
Though the situation is far from ideal and the Southwest Colorado teams, administrators and parents are killing time and wasting dollars in Front Range hotels and restaurants, coaches expect their competitors to be all business and ready to go when the weather clears.
“Being in Southwest Colorado, we have experienced similar weather during our competitions,” Ignacio head coach John Gurule said. “For that reason, we feel confident that we are prepared mentally and physically for this opportunity. Over the next two days, we’ll continue to prepare as best as we can and be ready.”
McMillan feels just as confident about his Demons squad. “We were completely prepared for this to happen and we stressed to our kids all week to be ready for changes,” he said. “We’ll be looking for community service opportunities here in the next couple days to keep the kids busy and active. Our athletes are ready for anything that comes their way.”
Gates at Jeffco Stadium will open at 6:30 a.m. Saturday.
jfries@durangoherald.com
