Like many of her teammates, 17-year-old Maya Koudmani has had enough of practicing rugby inside the Ernest Manning High School gym.
“You can’t do a lot of rugby in a gym because you need space,” Koudmani said. “We try and scrimmage in the gym but someone kicks it and it hits the roof and it’s not the same.”
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The girls rugby team has to share the gym with the boys team and it’s really crowded.
“I’m sure you can tell, we’ve got about 30 guys running around in half of a gym,” said 17-year-old rugby player, Tate Kaufman.
“Inside, on hardwood floors, you can’t do tackling drills, you can’t do some of the more rough rugby stuff we’d be doing by this time outside.”
But outside, Ernest Manning’s field is still buried.
It’s been tough for the school’s athletic director, Jovan Vujinovic, to organize team practices.
“It’s resulted in a lot of chaos in terms of trying to schedule and book teams in to get the time they need to practice,” Vujinovic said.
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Boys and girls rugby teams squeezed into one gym, senior and junior field hockey packed into the other one.
More than 150 games have been cancelled across the city so far.
Taryn Gower, 16, plays junior field hockey and just wants to play some games.
“It kind of sucks but at the same time, we’re practising hard. Once we get out there we’re going to have fun and that’s the whole point,” Gower said.
Officials at Ernest Manning would like the City of Calgary to come and remove the snow and get the kids back on the field. The city says that could damage the turf and that Mother Nature will have to remove it, which of course, will take longer.
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The city’s northwest facility manager, Alby Iamartino, says track and field won’t start until the Foothills and Glenmore tracks melt naturally and the same goes for soccer and rugby fields across the city.
High school field hockey could start next week because those teams share the field at Shouldice Park, which was professionally cleared through a special arrangement with amateur football.
“I haven’t seen anything like this in a long time,” Iamartino said.
“We want to get our players out on the fields and it’s unfortunate we haven’t had that opportunity yet.”
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The rest of the spring sports now have an April 30 target date to start playing games.
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