South Dakotans are familiar with the questionable weather that plagues our state’s springs. The weather can change from snowing and below 30 degrees to sunny and 65 degrees within a matter of days, and these back-and-forth conditions present many problems to the outdoor sports that have their seasons in our SD springtime such as girls golf, baseball and boys tennis.

Year after year, students hear several times over the morning announcements that one of these activities has been postponed or cancelled due to bad weather conditions. While it may not affect a majority of the school, these athletes always seem to have their seasons sadly cut short. Senior tennis player Aidan DeBoer has faced these weather issues for four years now.

“Having our season start a couple weeks into March, we deal with a lot of bad weather include snow, rain and my freshman year we had the ice storm,” said DeBoer. “It postpones a lot of matches but rarely we have to cancel them. If I had to guess, I would say that we have to postpone five matches a year and probably one of those gets cancelled.”

Yesterday, May 1, snow was the cause of postponing the boys tennis matches against OGHS. Instead of just cancelling activity altogether, the tennis team makes sure that when inclement weather does occur, they still get a workout in.

“If we do have a bad day of weather, instead of matches or practice outside we will head inside and do a lot of conditioning for about an hour in a gym,” said DeBoer.

Activities that were affected by the weather this week so far have been boys tennis matches postponed to May 10, girls golf tournament postponed to May 2 and baseball postponed as well.