Who doesn’t like a little snow now and then?
Here in Southwest Washington, we normally get one significant snowstorm a winter. So it’s a nice change of pace from the usual dreary wetness.
But I think most people involved with high school athletics would prefer that once-a-winter snow would arrive in January and not during the peak of winter postseason.
Last week’s snow event threw a monkey wrench into the prep postseason schedule for local athletes. And no one was impacted more than 4A gymnasts.
On Feb. 8, the Camas gymnastics team plus nine other individual gymnasts qualified out of the 4A district meet into the 4A bi-district meet.
The purpose of the bi-district meet is to allow teams from smaller districts — District 4 only has four 4A schools — the opportunity to qualify more athletes to the state meet.
However, the 4A bi-district gymnastics meet was last Friday in Olympia. The meet started at 10 a.m.
There were two problems with that for gymnasts in Southwest Washington.
Problem 1: The snow event that impacted Southwest Washington did not impact the Puget Sound area, so the bi-district meet went on as scheduled.
Problem 2: To get to that meet, local competitors would have had to depart early Friday morning, when it was still actively snowing in Southwest Washington, piling up 2 to 5 inches.
So gymnasts in Southwest Washington did not compete in the bi-district meet.
Originally, it was thought that would limit the number of local gymnasts who would advance to state to a precious few.
Eventually, the Camas team was granted a state berth, plus individual berths to six local gymnasts — Union’s Gabriella Howard (all-around), Carly Christ and Natalia Warren (vault, bars, beam, floor), Lillian Chen (vault) and Keira Yuthasastrakosol (bars, beam and floor), as well as Skyview’s Veronica Fetisov (vault, bars, beam and floor).
However, three gymnasts who had the opportunity to qualify for state through the bi-district had their seasons ended by the snowstorm.
The district boys swimming meets were also impacted by the snowstorm. The 4A/3A meet at Kelso and 2A/1A meet at Mark Morris were scheduled as two-day events, with preliminary heats on Friday and finals on Saturday.
But both meets had the Friday portion canceled by the snow. Both meets were reduced to one-day events as timed finals, meaning some events had as many has three heats on Saturday from which the top six times took the top six placings.
While the two-day format helps swimmers by giving them more competitive time in the pool and preparing them for the two-day format at state, Camas swim coach Kelly Dean said there may have been a silver lining in the shortened format.
“At first, I was really disappointed that we didn’t swim Friday,” Dean said. “But then I think in a way, it’s nice because our state meet is like five days from now. So they don’t have to be tired from two days of racing. They just had to bring it one day.”
There were no prep teams in action last Thursday, either locally or on the road as the snow caused slick conditions throughout the region.
But by mid-day Friday, temperatures began to rise and the snow began to melt.
Normally, school policy is that if school is canceled for the day, then no sports are held in the evening.
But Evergreen Public Schools made an exception on Friday, allowing girls basketball teams at Union, Mountain View and Evergreen host playoff games Friday night.
The district plowed parking lots, cleared walkways and dropped down salt to make the event sites safe for everyone.
Thankfully, by Saturday, the weather was no longer an issue.
And looking ahead at the forecast, it appears last week’s event likely will be our lone snow event of the winter. Temperatures are expected to rise into the 50s this week and could even approach 60 degrees by next week.
That’s almost spring-like.
By the way, the first day of spring sports practice is in less than two weeks — on March 3.
