An interesting night

[jchamp]

Originally Posted by REFANDUMP

What are some of the worst conditions you have ever worked in, and do you have any stories like mine ?? Just curious.

On this field in the town of Hamilton in Central New York State, I had a four-game Pop Warner set that started at noon one Saturday in November. The weather forecast called 50's cooling off to mid 30's with a chance of showers. It topped out at 45 about 2 pm before it started to sleet. By halftime of the second game it had dropped below 30, the wind had picked up to modest gusts, and the latent heat in the artificial surface that was keeping the precipitation liquid had dissipated. So we're playing on a frozen or freezing crunchy putting green surface. As you can see from that aerial photo in the link, the field is primarily marked for "not football". There are dark blue sidelines for football and bright white and yellow lines for everything else. On more than one occasion players got lost on the sideline, not being used to the markings and would hit someone out of bounds who nobody knew anyone was out of bounds. A couple of times, receivers would run along the yellow line and "catch" the ball while completely out of bounds. The bright parallel "nine-yard" marks confused players. Just before a halftime, a runner "stepped out" and proceeded to get clocked from someone who knew where he was on the field. As the snow and ice piled up, it just got worse. I moved the orange yard markers ONTO the sideline so that we would know where it was.

My favorite was the kid who had a visor on his facemask that fogged up and iced over on the inside. By the time we got off the field it was 15° and a steady wind, with a long, slow icy drive back to Rome. And honestly, the road was the only bad part of the whole day.

Not many penalties, that day. Very disciplined teams for PW kids.