Palmer High forced to cancel its 2008 spring season

Frontiersman

PALMER — There will be no joy in Palmer this season; the mighty Moose have struck out.

Palmer High will not field a softball team this spring due to difficulties the school had finding a coaching staff.

“We’re not having a team,” Palmer athletic director Jeff Thiede said Friday.

Thiede said that, after a lengthy search process, the school’s administration did manage to find coaches willing to help out with the program. But by the time that happened, there wasn’t enough interest from prospective players to make fielding a team feasible for the upcoming season.

“By the time we hired them, it was past the start of the season,” he said.

Only nine PHS students signed up to play. Although that’s the minimum needed to field a squad, Thiede said there would be too much uncertainty with such a small roster.

“It wasn’t until two weeks ago that we finalized a roster, which amounted to nine girls — which wasn’t conducive to having a softball program,” he said.

Because players could get hurt or sick during the course of a season, Thiede said it would have been unfair to Palmer’s opponents if the Moose were forced to cancel games mid-season.

“We really had no way of knowing for certain if we’d be able to make those games,” he said.

The decision was a tough one, he said, but was appropriate for the situation.

The loss of a softball season means the nine players who came out for the sport had to either skip the spring sports season or go out for other activities. Thiede said three or four of the players decided to sign up for the track team, one went out for baseball, and the rest just had to live with the bad news. Some players, he said, were quite disappointed with the school’s decision.

“They were upset they weren’t going to have a team,” he said.

Thiede said the coaches who did commit to the team have said they’ll be willing to give the sport a shot again next year, and he’s confident that Palmer’s disappearance from the softball diamond will only be a one-year thing.

“The coaches that we’d talked to that had come on board were interested in the next school year working with the program,” he said.

Colony head coach Mike Stewart said the loss of Palmer caused coaches in the Railbelt Conference (which includes Colony, Wasilla, Lathrop, Juneau, North Pole and West Valley) to do a bit of juggling with the schedule, but as of Friday, the games were set.

“I think it’s final now,” he said.

The first softball game in the Valley is scheduled for April 30 between Wasilla and Colony, who are now the only two programs in the Mat-Su with softball teams.

But while those teams are ready to go for the upcoming season, weather issues have kept them from getting on the field. Stewart said his team has yet to practice outdoors, but with sunny weather over the weekend, he’s hopeful the team can get on the diamond by

Monday.

“As long as no funny snow storms come through over the weekend.”

Contact Matt Tunseth at 352-2265 or matt.tunseth@frontiersman.com