I’m still trying to wrap my head around this coming week — we have your usual spring prep sports such as baseball and softball, college basketball AND college soccer and some adventure sports like the OAT Run all happening in the same week.
It’s exciting, yet daunting. We knew this was coming when we were looking at the sports schedules. All I can say to our readers is be patient, we’ll try to get to everything that we can. And coaches, you are more than welcome to email results and stats to us at sports@peninsuladailynews.com.
I’ve written before about how much I love the spring. Winter in the Pacific Northwest to me is simply all about making it through to another spring. Winter for me is a season of video games and watching hockey on TV and taking advantage of the odd sunny day to get out on a hike somewhere.
Spring is springing with the sunny skies and warm afternoons and, yes, the first brush fire of the season on the newsroom scanner today.
As an aside … speaking of video games, I will defeat you one of these days, Doom Eternal. Oh, yes, I will.
I’m personally taking advantage of a staggering amount of vacation time that has built up during the pandemic to try and take an extra day to get outside and get back in shape. I had a dream of climbing a couple of big mountains in Banff National Park this August, but I’m becoming increasingly pessimistic that the border will be fully open by August, so I double-booked a hotel in Oregon and hope to climb some mountains in central Oregon this summer. I need a motivation to get outside and get back in shape.
The one great thing about the pandemic last year is I had lots of time to get outside and go hiking in Olympic National Park. In a very weird way, it was one of the best summers I’ve ever had. I got myself to the point at which I could climb Hurricane Hill in less than an hour.
Spring is a reminder that summer is coming and how much I love the Pacific Northwest summers. I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley, where it was 100-109 F every day for 90 straight days. I lived in Montana for 14 years, which is far cooler than California, but seriously prone to smoke events.
I came back to the Pacific Northwest to get out of the heat and the smoke and for the most part, that’s worked out. The smoke last September was about the worst I’ve ever seen anywhere. I’m hoping that was a freakish thing, but the climate is definitely changing because when I lived here in the 1990s, we never once had smoke in eight years.
Spring is a time of the days becoming more lengthy, the rain gets warmer, my mood gets better. When the indoor sports move under the sun and above the grass. My mood is getting especially better with one vaccine in the arm and the second one a few days away. I know the fourth wave is coming, but I’m hopeful it will not crest as high as the earlier waves and most of the most vulnerable people will have been vaccinated.
From a sporting standpoint, this is obviously a unique spring because of the unusual mishmash of sports we have this year. This week we get a bit of a break with the Easter holiday, but last week, our sporting calendar when I printed it out actually came out two full pages long.
And now, Peninsula College is back and playing sports, and not just playing sports, but four of them at once. That has never happened since I came back.
It’s fun to be this overbooked. I’m keeping a good attitude about it because we had nearly a full year of virtually no local sports. And days it was hard to stay optimistic.
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Sports Editor Pierre LaBossiere can be contacted at plabossiere@peninsuladailynews.com.
