A week after Gov. Kim Reynolds snuffed out the spring sports season by canceling the remainder of the school year, her announcement to lighten restrictions on elective surgeries and farmers’ markets gave Marshalltown High School softball coach Jim Palmer a glimmer of hope.

It breathed life into the idea that summer sports across the state still have a chance.

As the spring sports season was crossed off the calendar, MHS athletic director Ryan Isgrig met with his coaches in a video conference in hopes of figuring out a way to honor the seniors who lost their last opportunities to compete as Bobcats. He also considered the possibility that those with enough desire to represent their school and community one last time might even try out for a summer sport in hopes of satisfying that ambition.

The anticipated start date, should summer sports be allowed to compete, would be June 1 for practices. According to the Iowa High School Athletic Association and the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union, summer sports “are suspended pending an assessment made in collaboration with state officials before June. Practice, competition and postseason dates will be announced when they become available.”

Until further delays or cancellations are made or the summer season arrives in its currently unpredictable form, all the Bobcats can do is be prepared.

“We’ll get guidance from the state level if we’re good to go or not,” Isgrig said. “They gave us a two-week window for school so I would anticipate something similar for the summer, because kids are of course going to be eager to prepare as well as the coaches, and it’s hard to do that when you’re not sure if you’re going to have a season or not.

“For now we’ll proceed as planned.”

Palmer, preparing for his fifth season at the helm of the Bobcat softball program, saw Reynolds’ announcement on Friday as the silver lining to an otherwise cloudy forecast. Easing the restrictions in any capacity is the type of progress he thinks will mean a better chance for the summer season to happen.

“I would say Friday it kind of took a turn,” he said. “I have been approaching it as we’re going to play, but when they came out Friday and the Governor said we’re going to open things, that gave me more hope for the season.

“We’re not allowed to do anything as a team until June 1, so we’re kind of locked down at the moment, but the girls have been out working. It’s do what you can do, but all I can do is encourage them. It really falls on the girls getting out and doing it.”

Palmer said his team had the ambition to improve upon last year’s six-win campaign, and he just hopes his three seniors get the chance to do that. A limited schedule is anticipated, however, but he says the team will take what it can get at this point.

“I’d love nothing more than for Erica (Johnson), Madi (Finch) and Gabby (Himes) to end their senior year participating in something,” Palmer said. “There was a little ray of light when [Reynolds] opened up a few things there, but supposedly we haven’t even peaked (in coronavirus illnesses in Iowa) yet.

“I’m gung-ho, I’m ready to go, but I’ve just got to sit back and wait. Hopefully the girls are throwing and keeping their arms in shape, but all the teams are in the same boat.”

First-year head baseball coach Derek Wrage is in a similar vessel, though in an entirely new body of water. He said he had a little more than three weeks with his new team training during the spring before the coronavirus caused changes across the country.

“I think at first when it started happening, they extended spring break a week and we said ‘it is what it is,'” Wrage recalled. “Then they moved it back to April and still I thought we were fine, even April 30 still wasn’t cutting into official practice, so I never would have guessed we’d be at this point.

“June 1 is now our first day of practice. It’s all kind of hard to believe. It’s a crazy deal to have all this going on in my first year here, but there’s not a lot we can do, just hope and pray we have a season.”

This is to be Wrage’s first season as a varsity head coach after serving as an assistant at his alma mater in Newton as well as at Montezuma prior to that. He’s plenty familiar with Marshalltown, having played against the Bobcats as a prep while calling it his “home away from home” with grandparents still living here. His father, Jeff, was a 1981 MHS graduate.

But nothing in his past could have prepared him for this uncertain future.

“Before this all happened we had three weeks of open gyms, getting some swings in and our arms up, we were just about to get pitchers and catchers started and that was when we got told we were shut down,” he said. “We got in a little bit of work, obviously not as much as we’d like, and now we’ve got to sit and wait.”

Wrage said the team received individual workouts from MHS strength and conditioning coordinator Allen Mann, a former Bobcat baseball player, but baseball coaches aren’t allowed to conduct practices either. It’s not an ideal situation for somebody hoping to follow up in the 26-year legacy left by former head coach Steve Hanson, but Wrage sees the bright side to that as well.

“I’m pretty fortunate coach Hanson ran the program the way he did so that the players know what they’re doing and they know how to do it the right way,” Wrage said. “Some of the things you just don’t have to teach them.

“It seemed like a good reason to [take the job] because there’s a reason the program worked and a reason they won so many games. I get to come in and inherit that system.”

Wrage, who graduated from Newton in 2014 and Cornell College in 2018, has a fresh perspective on how hard this pandemic must be for high school seniors considering his age, while Palmer’s daughter, Jadyn, is a sophomore on his softball team who was out for track this spring.

“We’re just feeling our way through this and the best thing is to try to stay positive, and it’s tough,” said Palmer. “I struggle with it, it’s frustrating.

“My daughter was out for track for the first time and she’s got my stride.”

Palmer, a 1985 MHS graduate who still holds the school’s 4×800-meter relay record along with Paul Atha, Charles Grim and Kent Terrillion, still has that competitive fire burning.

“It kind of drives me crazy to be honest,” he said of the current pandemic state. “I’m frustrated but there’s nothing I can do. I’m going to Zoom with some players this week and see how they’re doing.”

The mental well-being of the student-athletes affected by the cancellation of the remainder of school, prom, graduation, the entire spring sports season and potentially the summer slate is something Wrage has worried about with the many changes as the month has progressed.

“I can’t even imagine being a high school kid through this, especially the seniors,” he said. “I feel so bad. They’re losing that last bit of time with friends before they all go their separate ways.

“I’m more worried about kids being kids than ballplayers. We’re always there for the kids because we love them as people, not just athletes. I only got to see them for 3-4 weeks before this all started to happen, but I’ll make myself available to them to talk whether it’s baseball related or not.”