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Time for baseball, football seasons to switch
JASON NADOLINSKI Sports Reporter
Certainly, with all that has occurred over the past week, high school sports - and

sports in general - take a back seat in terms of importance. People will have a much better easier living without seeing their favorite teams play compared to trying to figure out how to stay warm, how to prevent their basements from flooding, or whether or not their drinking water is safe to consume. Even those few items are just the tip of the iceberg for tens of thousands of those affected (or even still without) due to the recent freak snow storm.

However, this past week's situation does give us another reason to consider flip-flopping the area's high school football and baseball seasons.

In the past, I've argued for this kind of switch more for the baseball aspect than the football - who really expects any school to play its first handful of scheduled baseball games in early April, considering the spring thaw and its effects on the local diamonds? - but now it seems to be a logical move for both sports.

When the storm cancelled the majority of this past Friday and Saturday's football games, there were playoff implications on the line in many of them. Only seven of the 20 Federation playoff berths had been definitively decided going into this past weekend, but two more were clinched Saturday in a pair of the five games that were able to be held in all of Section VI. Games with playoff significance neared double digits, including a battle of Cheektowaga that pitted John F. Kennedy against Cleveland Hill for the Class C North's second spot, as well as games involving Iroquois and Amherst, as well as West Seneca East and Cheektowaga, all of whom were battling for the Class A South's two spots.

Of course, there'd be a little more flexibility to get those games in if the football season was in the spring. Unlike baseball, which can play doubleheaders in one day, football teams are mandated by the state to have at least four day's rest and recovery between contests. That means that, in order to get in both the week seven and week eight games by this weekend - week eight games are usually the crosstown rivalry games or other non-league contests, but some do still have playoff implications - the games lost to the weather would have to be played no later than Tuesday. Whether or not that happened wasn't known as this week's paper went to press.

Having all those games potentially played this Saturday will also more than likely create an officiating shortage, if that is what the regular season comes down to. It's one thing to play all the regularly scheduled games on Saturday, but throwing another dozen or two games might be impossible just from that standpoint.

Baseball teams can just as easily play their sport in the fall as football teams could play in the spring, and since there are athletes that play both sports, there aren't really too many kids who would be shortchanged and have to choose between one sport or the other. It seems to me that both sports would have an easier time fitting in all their regular-season games on time if they did switch seasons, and even if something like this past weekend's craziness came up, there'd be more flexibility for getting everything in as scheduled.

Maybe it'll take a freak weather occurrence like this past weekend's to open some eyes, but it might just lead to better things in the long run.