Didn't we play in rain and mud when we were kids?

My son and I had a frustrating Saturday morning.  He needed to be at a field at 8:15am for warmup for a 9:00am kickoff.  He was actually supposed to play two matches back to back for different squads - he was excited, I was excited.  The drive is almost an hour, so off we went at 7:20 under clear blue skies.  It had rained hard on Wednesday, but not since.

The club who we were playing ended up closing the fields due to "poor conditions" and canceling both matches - they did this after all of us were already driving our sons to the match!  They knew the distance we had to travel, so they must have known the posted cancellation on their web site was unlikely to reach most of us before we got to the fields.  Ridiculous, considering that it wasn't a sudden wicked storm that blew in - they could have notified us on Friday night.

 The immediate frustration of our screwed up Saturday morning is not what I'm blogging about.  This is about a trend I see toward clubs canceling matches.  They are canceled because there is currently rain falling, and they are canceled because rain fell 3 days earlier.  Even our own club seems to have a haphazard approach to determining if fields will be open, and our club has also been guilty of closing fields within an hour or so of the scheduled start of a match.  I can only guess that, absent lightning danger, they are trying to "save their fields" for games later in the season.

No, I do not claim that I walked five miles to and from school every day when I was a kid, uphill both ways and in two feet of snow.  But I do remember playing in some horrible conditions.  I remember playing with a kit so wet with rain that it seemed I had jumped in a lake.  As for field conditions, I remember playing a couple early morning games on a field where the mud had frozen solid and the puddles of water on the field had frozen.  Going for a ball one time my cleat hit the puddle and I basically skated across it, hit the frozen mud on the far side of the frozen puddle, and took a dive onto the tundra.

The fields at the club where we were supposed to play are in chronically poor condition.  So the idea that they were saving them for something, as though by not playing a couple of matches today they would be magically transformed to resemble a PGA fairway, is ridiculous.  And when clubs cancel matches too readily, they are cheating young players out of important lessons in learning to handle whatever conditions (in the sky or on the field) that are thrown at them.

I am just relating a Dad's perspective on all of this.  I am not a groundskeeper, so I may underestimate how much damage my son's teams would have done to the pitch today.  But I don't care, and here is why.  Clubs have fields to play matches on.  If a field can't handle having matches played on it in anything less than 4 or 5 days of dry weather as well as dry game day weather, then it doesn't deserve to be "saved for the rest of the season."  No, the kids deserve to play, and if there are a few more sections of dirt for the rest of the season, I guess club management needs to do a little more off season work on soil and drainage. 

That's not my son's job, his job is to get up at 6:30 on a sunny Saturday morning and go play two matches.  And he really doesn't care if he plays on dirt, he just wants to play.