IPSWICH – While this past week’s weather was a source of frustration for area coaches, athletes and fans, it wasn’t any better for school athletic directors. They are the ones who have to try to figure out the road that lies ahead.

If there is one silver lining, it’s still early in the season and there is still some wiggle room on the remaining calendar as opposed to a few years ago when storms hit in late January.

“That was a headache, because we didn’t have any time left,” said Ipswich athletic director Dan Knust. “When you look at the schedule now, you can at least least say, yeah, we’ve got a few open dates here and you start checking them off.”

There are a variety of issues when it comes to finding replacement dates for games that have already been postponed. It’s not as a simple as just picking a date on a calendar. Ipswich had multiple games called off this week, including boys and girls basketball games against Langford Area.

“Do we turn it into a doubleheader or do you try and find two dates that work? In our case we were supposed to host one and go away on the other one,” Knust said. “Neither team really wants to give up a home game, so now you have to find two dates. It does make it a little more difficult.”

Then there is the issue of finding officials who have dates available to work the games.

“We’re blessed with where we’re at,” Knust said. “The Aberdeen area has great officials.”

Some places do not have an abundance of officials, however.

“If we had a lower number of officials, like say the Mobridge area, we’d be calling officials to look for open dates rather than calling the teams to look for open dates and then find officials,” Knust said.

Throw in finding individuals who are willing and able to drive busses to and from games and the issue gets even more complicated.

That’s not including unpredictable weather patterns which can cause school to be called off on a moment’s notice. That can be even more of an issue for a school like Ipswich, which has a fair number of rural students.

“Our school district goes from Mina Lake over to almost Roscoe,” Knust said.

Of course, when one domino falls, it tends to have a trickle affect. Knust pointed out that it’s not just the varsity teams that are impacted when games are altered.

“One thing that people don’t take into account when doing all this too, is we try and get the varsity games in and it might cause some disturbance in the middle school schedules,” Knust said.

And when all the pieces eventually do fit into place, it only takes another weather event to throw everything back into flux.

“The winter this year is going to be interesting,” Knust said. “Just in this week alone, making up three dates, now four dates really, is going to fill the calendar for later in the year. Now, we get another storm like this, where it wipes out two games in January, we don’t have much room for it.”

The Tigers were forced to call off today’s basketball doubleheader with Webster to cap off a difficult week.

“We have kids who haven’t been out of their farm yards, yet,” Knust said.

Throw in an open date next Tuesday that Knust could not find a foe for, and the Ipswich boys’ basketball team will go nearly the entire first month of the season without a single game.

“We’re 0-for-3 this week,” Knust said. “Our first boys’ game will be Dec. 30 and our first JV boys’ game will be after the first of the year.”

Things aren’t going much better for the Ipswich-Bowdle wrestling cooperative. Some of the members were unable to compete in the first action of the season and had a tourney they were scheduled to compete in today called off.

“They don’t get to wrestle (today) and now you’re looking at their first meet after the first of the year,” Knust said, “and it’s like boy, we have kids that can be state place-winners and they can’t get on the mat.”

Add it all up, and athletic directors have the unenviable task of trying to fit all the pieces together and then hoping that nothing scrambles the puzzle.

“So many things have to go right,” Knust said.