Tag Archives: Weather

Sports

NECC Snow Plans For Spring Season

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With the spring sports season ready to get underway within the next two weeks, NECC is trying to find a way to cope with all the snow that still blankets all the playing fields. While the baseball team has their yearly trip to Florida for the start of their season, they will still return to a snow-covered diamond. The softball and track team face the same dilemma.

Athletic Director Sue MacAvoy has been looking for places to play in the meantime.
“We’ve been talking to some places around here with turf fields, like Haverhill Stadium,” she said. “Baseball and softball have been practicing there a bit, with track running around the perimeter.”

But Haverhill Stadium has one of the very few turf fields in the area, making it hard to find time to get out there.

“Every school around wants to practice and play out there,” MacAvoy said. “It’s just hard to find times that work for everybody.”

MacAvoy estimates that the fields on the Haverhill campus won’t be ready until at least mid-April, especially with the snowfall this past weekend. In the meantime, the Knights’ baseball team has one game scheduled at Haverhill Stadium, against Bunker Hill Community College on Saturday, March 28.

The weather has certainly played a part in the limited numbers for the track program so far, making it hard to new head coach Beau Couture to get a feel for his team.

The softball team has been throwing the ball around in the gym on campus for the most part. They’ve been practicing since about January, and have been outside at Haverhill Stadium four times. The girls are just itching to get out on the field, and they’ve ramped up their practices to five days a week. The Knights are scheduled to begin their season on Saturday, March 28 against NHTI. The game is scheduled to be played on the Haverhill campus, but there is a possibility that it will be moved to NHTI’s home field in Concord.

This will be the first season that softball will be a full varsity sport at NECC.

So while the snow plows try to move some of the snow off the track to help get the weight off it, MacAvoy will continue to look for ways to get her teams out onto the field for the spring sports season.

Campus Life

NECC Parking Lot

 

By Alex Dehullu

The NECC parking lot has seen better days. Students who had to pay for their parking pass are losing several parking spots because of excess snow. There has been minimal snowfall in the past two weeks, but the parking lots are still dealing with the after effects of the multiple large snowstorms that New England has recently suffered.

Michael Barry, a West Newbury resident, drives to his class every day and is not a fan of what the parking lot has come to.

“There are no lines anymore — people form their own spots with way too much room between cars. I can’t fit my truck into half of the spots because the cars on both sides left so little room in between,” said Barry.

This problem is shared by many other NECC students, and it forces students to park farther and farther away from the school.

In the summer, the long walk wouldn’t be too bad, but due to the unbelievable amount of snow, students must walk down the busy road with cars coming from both sides all the way to the sidewalk in front of C building.

Another NECC student, Andrew Wallace said, “I’m sick of this. If I show up to class anything but early I have to walk so far through the icy street in the freezing cold while cars drive by less than three feet away. At some point the school is going to have to finish cleaning the parking lot up.”

It’s obvious that NECC has put in a lot of effort to cleaning up the parking lot. Students see maintenance workers constantly cleaning sidewalks and the plows do their best to clear the lot of snow after each storm.

There are a couple of moves NECC could make to improve the conditions of their parking lot. One NECC student, Branscome Dubina, suggested, “they should spend some of the money we paid to park there to have snow removed, maybe free up some space for more cars and a decent walk way.”

If there are any more major snowstorms, the conditions of the parking lot may continue to decline. It will be interesting to see how the school will respond.

Campus Life

A Semester to Remember

 

By Alex Dehullu

For the past month, Massachusetts has been getting snowstorm after snowstorm, bringing more snow than anyone in the area is accustomed to. It seems hard to believe that the snow is finally slowing down and things are beginning to return to normal.

For each of the blizzards NECC was left with no option but to cancel classes for one or two days. Students were excited to receive the text alert from NECC, giving them more and more days off.

Now that the snow is clearing and classes are returning to their normal schedules, students along with professors need to find a way to make up for lost time.
Every class has a required amount of lecture hours and the several class hours missed from the snow is causing a lot of confusion and stress for both students and teachers.

One NECC student, Patrick Murphy, said, “I know for a fact one of my friends professors has already added ten to fifteen minutes to all future classes in order to make up for all those missed classes, and that makes me wonder what I should expect from my professors.”

Some NECC professors have already decided how they are planning on making up the lost lecture hours, but there are some that have either not decided or not informed their students on what they plan to do.

Brian Adamopoulos, a full time NECC student, said, “I noticed very quickly how my professors began to speed up their lesson plans after the snow and the extra work is stressing me out. The snow really disrupted this semester and I’m really hoping it doesn’t harm my grades.”

To some, it may seem unfair for teachers to go through information at a faster pace in order to catch up to where they were supposed to be, but at this point professors are not left with many options.

Other professors decided to continue teaching at the same pace and push back future tests and quizzes.

Mario Encarnacion, a student at NECC, discussed in an interview earlier this week how his microeconomics professor was one of the professors who decided it was best to continue the semester at the pace as before the blizzards. His professor has pushed the first test back over a week to ensure the students had time to prepare.
Encarnacion said, “It was really a relief to find out that the test had been moved back. I’m still not sure what my professor is planning on doing to make up those missed classes, though.”

Even though these blizzards have finally taken a break, it’s clear that the professors along with the students have a lot of work ahead of them before the end of this spring semester.