HEYEN: A letter to Mother Nature

Dear Mother Nature, What do you have against spring sports? We all put up with the rain, and the wind, and the temperatures hovering around 40 degrees (if we're lucky) for the first few weeks of the spring season. But you just had to do it, didn't you? Snow. On April 18. Rude. You obviously don't understand what you're missing out on, the incredible athletes that, even when they've been able to compete this spring, have been limited in their performance by conditions that would be better fit playoff football. I mean, you should've been there when Bellevue's Maci Smythe threw a no-hitter in short sleeves with the temperature below 40. Or how about the 10.95-second 100-meter dash run by Perkins' Collin Nemitz in conditions so bad that the softball game a couple hundred feet away was postponed? And those are just a couple of the feats that you've allowed, barely, to happen. We've yet to see any of the high-powered SBC Bay Division baseball and softball matchups that had me, and many others, so excited in the preseason. Your snow delayed what promised to be a thrilling Edison and Margaretta gameday on Monday. And that rain that you keep on sending at 3 or 4 p.m. each day to spoil the party at the last minute? That pushed back Oak Harbor and Margaretta's first meeting, to name just one more, and the maddening timing has already crashed a handful of great games. Maybe you like chaos, Mother Nature. That's certainly what you're creating. The final week-plus of the regular season, usually filled with nonconference matchups meant for tuning up for the playoffs? That time will instead be spent deciding league title races, sometimes in a very cramped fashion. Don't get me started on the annoyance that the state's all-time best girls pole vaulter, Kenna Stimmel, hasn't had a clean day to really take to the skies yet. We want to see Stimmel vault, and Edison's Thomas Simon and Kira Appeman pitch, and Perkins' Luke Walton and Cameron Kaufman show off their Division I-bound talents. Instead, last week, you had me standing under an umbrella at Port Clinton, where on the baseball diamond it was Simon's day to get the ball but instead the last action on the field was a few PC players hammering in the tarp's stakes. Fifty feet away, the softball teams almost simultaneously took the tarps off, ever the optimists — or maybe just resigned that this is as good as it gets. Appeman was leading off. But the ball was too wet, and Appeman never even made it to the circle for the bottom of the first. Three walks and a few wild pitches later and that game wouldn't continue, either. A couple of Port Clinton's boys tennis players, who will have a major rematch with Huron next week that could decide the Bay Division title, were trying to get some rallies in. But they, too, had no real choice but to give up. We're not asking for Florida weather. And at least you sent 60 degrees and sunshine for Perkins' baseball game at Tiffin Columbian recently. But then it was back to 30-mph winds at Clyde a couple days later. Give the athletes a chance. Let them on the fields and the tracks and the courts. Let them show just how talented they are. Because I hate to break it to you, Mother Nature, but no one's here to see you. We're here to see home runs and bunt singles, strikeouts and aces, records set and bars cleared. So I'm just really, really hoping that what they say is true, that April showers bring May flowers — and hopefully some spring sports in the sunshine, too. Sincerely, A concerned sportswriter