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'Not Ideal': High School Sports Frozen By April Snow

FARMINGTON, Minn. (WCCO) -- The frozen tundra is a welcomed nickname for football fields, not baseball diamonds.

"Our baseball team went to Dundas to the dome today. Our softball team has gone to Eden Prairie to scrimmage in the dome," said Bill Tschida, athletic director for Farmington High School (FHS).

The track and lacrosse teams for FHS went into their gyms for practice Tuesday.

The snow cancelled baseball games and track meets this week, but even if the flakes never fell the temperature continues to take its toll.

"The fact that we haven't had any stretch of warm weather to kind of get the frost out and warm up the ground is really even kind of adding on top of it," Tschida said. He added that the games that were postponed early in the season will be bunched up with the games later in the season, meaning less practice time. "It's not ideal," he said.

And more snow next week might further delay student athletes across the state from taking the field, while also adding more winter work for plow drivers like Chris Marti.

"Yeah, I'm ready for spring. I've been done with winter for a minute now," he said as he sat in his plow truck at a gas station near St. Paul.

Marti works for Columbia Building Services with a focus clearing snow in downtown Minneapolis. He also does window washing, but that's been put on hold.

"Tonight's anticipating to be a little easier, tomorrow's supposed to be a little bit more snow," he said. "We're expecting 6-8 [inches]."

Many commuters will see the level of fresh powder first hand on their way in to the Twin Cities metro, except for the areas Marti and his teams plows away using the blades they simply can't put into storage yet.

"We were getting close, we were gearing up to switch [the blades out]. It's just been an interesting, interesting spring," he said.

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