Things learned, observed in Pacific high school spring sports season Week 4.0

It was noble in concept when then-district superintendent Mike Diekmann put a true DODDS Japan sports circuit on the map for school year 1999-2000.
Schools in far-flung locales, E.J. King, Matthew C. Perry and Robert D. Edgren no longer had to go longing for competition against their Kanto Plain brethren; they each now have full-fledged schedules in football, volleyball, tennis, cross country, basketball, wrestling, baseball, softball, track and soccer.
Problem is, the weather sometimes is uncooperative and the calendar always is, at least where tennis, baseball, softball, track and sometimes soccer are concerned.
Purely by chance, the last two weekends have proven to be rain magnets. Heavy rain, sideways rain, the sort of rain that settles in and keeps up all day or all weekend.
Two Kanto Plain track and field meets got called off 17 hours before they were to begin on Saturday, an international-schools meet at Tokyo's Kinuta Park and a DODDS all-comers meet at Camp Zama. This, a week after a combined Japan schools practice meet at Zama got almost completely washed out, except for a few running events. Guess the meet organizers didn't want to take a chance after that March 10 washout. Wise decision.
Baseball and softball were completely out of the conversation on March 9-10 at Zama. Perry, King and Edgren did get in some boys and girls games at Yokota, Zama and Nile C. Kinnick on Friday, but Saturday's action was a wash. Soccer matches did get played at Sasebo, where E.J. King's fields are turfed, and at Iwakuni, where Perry's match organizers got creative in clearing the field; more on that later.
It's an exercise in frustration, especially since most weekends are filled, wall to wall, with long-haul matches on the schedule. It's 360 miles from Tokyo to Misawa, some 560 miles to Iwakuni and 780 to Sasebo. It's much easier to reschedule Kanto Plain matches, when the schools are so much closer. It's nigh onto impossible to reschedule DODDS Japan sports events of most any type once postponed. Worse, there are fewer options for the outlying schools, where international schools are fewer or more distant than in the Kan-to and Japanese schools have their own leagues.
Squeegees are normally associated with tennis courts when rain turns hardcourts into skating rinks. Mark Lange, Matthew C. Perry's boys soccer coach, continues to make creative use of the court driers on a different sort of court – the soccer pitch.
From 6:30 a.m. Saturday, Lange and his star striker Tyelor Apple, among others, wielded Squeegees to clear off enough water from Lake Perry (Lange's nickname for the school field when it becomes waterlogged due to heavy rain) so that Robert D. Edgren and the host Matthew C. Perry Samurai could play, albeit on a shortened field. The two schools teed it up, then played a mix-and-match game as the two sides used each other's players in a friendly match.
"Masters in the bag, working on my doctorate," Lange posted on Facebook in response to me calling him, "Lord of the Squeegee."