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Every high school sports season has its strengths, but there's something unique about the arrival of fall sports. A quiet summer immediately shifts to the busy August sports calendar. Football, unified flag football, girls’ flag football, boys’ and girls’ soccer, volleyball, boys’ tennis, golf, cross country, and other activities all launch almost simultaneously, creating an energy that you don't see at any other point in the school year.
There is a natural lull after spring championships conclude. Fans miss the competition filling the air, or the gym indoors as much as the athletes miss the action. With the exception of semistate and state championship contenders, a few days into the June feel like going cold turkey on whatever your favorite guilty pleasure is.
The IHSAA officials’ clinic Warsaw customarily hosts in July was cancelled due to severe weather, and it’s usually my first time entering the press box as the new scholastic sports year approaches. With this cancellation, my brain remained in summer lull mode, but watching Warsaw’s early August Saturday parent practice felt like a boisterous wake-up call. The athletes, coaches, families, and fans who comprise the scholastic athletic year are eager for scoreboards, standings, rivalries, and Friday night routines to return.
Fall sports don't ease into the schedule. One week you're discussing summer vacations, and the next thing… you're trying to keep up with football scrimmages, soccer tournaments, volleyball invitationals, and golf matches.
The sheer volume of activity on Warsaw Community High School’s campus creates momentum while coinciding with a new school year. Educators will often tell prep sports fans who are pacing like lions in their homes sometime just before or just after the IHSAA moratorium week to not wish away the educators’ well-deserved break.
Students, parents, teachers, and alumni - on the other hand - are all returning to familiar routines, and although the summer break seems to end more quickly than we want it to end, this familiar fall sports can feel just as overdue as we felt the break was too short.
Does it also seem, as fall sports are launched in their respective home openers, crowds are naturally larger because everyone is reconnecting after summer?
Last week’s column noted football’s time for a throne in the Indiana high school sports castle, and these days among almost all the Times-Union area prep campuses football often drives the conversation.
Friday night lights bring attention to athletics as a whole. Fisher Field in the Tiger Athletic Complex is the place where there is – in the penultimate home football pregame agenda – time dedicated to honoring seniors from boys’ tennis, and boys’ and girls’ cross country.
That heightened interest in gathering on campus in larger numbers than what we experience in spring sports spills over into soccer, volleyball, and unified football as well as the aforementioned sports honored at a football pregame ceremony.
August is the time just before summer is on its “back nine” is the month of optimism as each team begins its slate undefeated. Every player believes this could be the season when something special happens. The foliage color changes in October, on the other hand, tends to change the hearts and minds among athletes who are turning in their gear, especially seniors who will do it for the last time.
Aside from baseball, softball, and boys’ volleyball individual achievement is prominent, the spring sports crowds are smaller, and some events cannot be played in the rain so the schedules are more or less in pencil. Most of the seasons are compressed into about seven weeks instead of ten to twelve weeks.
Maybe that's the real reason fall sports feel different.
It's not just football, packed stands, or cooler weather (without the spring bluster). It's the sense of possibility. Everyone gets a fresh start after a summer away from scoreboards and standings. Coaches’ goals, athletes’ opportunities and communities’ reloaded teams they rally behind are fresh and new again.
For a few weeks each August, every season still has the chance to become a memorable one. It’s going to move from start to finish quickly, especially for families cheering on a senior athlete.
Wherever you’re enjoying fall sports in our Times-Union area, don’t let any moment be taken for granted, especially in the fall sports season, where it’s just different.
