Due to record snowfall in 2015, BHS athletic teams are now forced to practice inside for their upcoming outdoor sports season.

Many teams wonder how to prepare for a season with no chance to practice outdoors because of snow covering all the playing surfaces. This poses challenges for Athletic Director Dennis Walton.

“Spring is a really short season because we are in Maine. It starts later to begin with so once it does start it’s bang, bang, bang, and game, game, game,” Walton said.

The normal problems that occur in the Maine spring is rain, but this year the problem could be both rain and snow which causes a horrible situation for Walton.

“Your entire season is played in a five- to six-week span, its no different then when you have rainy seasons,” said Walton. “It becomes absolutely hectic where you feel like you are playing everyday to make up games.”

Coaches have a hard time finding a place to practice when all the fields are covered in snow. Girl’s tennis coach Terri Shang knows the struggle of time and space.

“They usually don’t fit us in the schedule because we find it really isn’t beneficial for us to be indoors, so typically we don’t do it,” said Shang.

With the outdoor track still under snow, assistant track coach Leslie Mourmouras looks at  how the outdoor track team will have to compete for practice time for the indoor throwers and jumpers.

“The snow will delay a lot of the throwing and jumping events,” said Mourmouras. “The runners are going to be able to get out on the road, no problem, but we are going to fight for some gym time and we won’t be able to get the equipment out there, so I think it’s going to delay some training.”

Baseball also faces a problem with the snow staying because the Maine Principals Association (MPA) only gives baseball five dates to play preseason scrimmages which are used to judge players’ perspective varsity chances. Varsity coach Keith Leblanc considers how preseason scrimmages are important for seeing players play against other teams.

“It will make it more difficult to assess where guys are against other teams pitching because we won’t be able to see as much live action,” Leblanc said.

Practicing indoors for some sports causes major issues, because gyms are small compared to the regular field of play, varsity girls lacrosse coach Caitlin Albert faces problems with practicing inside.

“One thing that’s big about lacrosse is, that it’s such a quick game that you need to work on everything that happens in the midfield and the transition,” said Albert. “That’s something that we won’t be able to work on, we will only be able to work on defense and offense and that kinda affects us.”

Starting this year if the snow causes a major delay to girls lacrosse going outside they may have access to turf time at University of New England (UNE) because  Albert is an assistant coach at UNE.

“We plan to be indoors as long as we have to, but now that I’m the assistant coach at UNE this spring for lacrosse,” said Albert. “We do and may have access to some turf time if needed but otherwise we will try and not let it affect us.”

Walton understands the struggle that all the coaches have to deal with. He has his own challenges with rescheduling, but Walton has the same mind set of every coach.

“It’s like anything else, it’s gonna be day-to-day and hope for the best.”