Jan. 10, 2011
By Matt Winkeljohn
Sting Daily
Sharon Perkins took her young prospects through two-a-day workouts Monday, and there’s a pretty good chance they’ll hit it again today even if the weather does not improve.
The snow and cold, in fact, led the Georgia Tech softball coach and her two children to go sledding twice in their Suwanee neighborhood yesterday, as their school and Tech were closed.
Today’s scheduled start of Tech’s spring softball practice . . . well, that’s not happening.
Mewborn Field is under a few inches of snow and ice, the forecast calls for temperatures and suggest that what’s on the ground now is going to stay a few days with additional freezing, and, “I keep looking at weather and it may be Thursday before we start practice,” said Perkins. “I may not get out of my neighborhood until Wednesday.”
Perkins grew up in Sarasota, Fla., and she’s not a fan of cold weather by any means, but when snow is added to the mix, she and her daughter Katie, 10, and her son Nicholas, 6, don’t seem to mind.
“We’ve already been out twice; it’s great,” Perkins said Monday afternoon. “Last year, we only got an inch and it was easy to sled down the back yard and the side yard. This year, there are people with real sleds and they’re going down the street. You can tell some of them are from the North. I’m putting helmets on my kids; they’re really going fast.”
At least one of Perkins’ players, freshman Ashley Thomas, isn’t going anywhere. She’s stuck in Texas, socked in by the weather.
It would take the Yellow Jackets not getting on the field for a long time to make a significant difference in their preparations for the season.
“It’s nice that we have the indoor cages, and we can do quite a bit of work in there. It’s the time of year where we need to sit down and talk about our goals, anyway, and find out what everybody did over break. It’s a definite advantage being down South. We have the Buzz Classic in early March, and for some of the teams that come down, it’s their first time outdoors. That can be a shock for them.”
Whether Tech begins class today (one day later than scheduled) or not, there’s not likely to be a full-on softball practice of any kind even indoors. There may be more sledding, though.
“We might even go out again [Monday],” Perkins said Monday afternoon. “My son is pretty gung-ho about it, and he might talk me into it. The hills are OK in our neighborhood.”
Any fun snow stories out there? Send them to stingdaily@gmail.com. Photos welcome.
