On the week of Aug. 20, 2023 many mid-western states were affected by a heat dome. Temperatures easily reached 100 and with the heat and added humidity it felt anywhere from 110° to 120° outside. Many people across the United States were negatively affected by the heat index, but here in our small community at St. Charles High School coaches were forced to make changes to their practices to get their players ready for the upcoming season.

All of the sports were forced to practice inside, leaving many of them without a proper practice space. While some may think that sharing the gym caused problems between coaches, that is the exact opposite of what happened. They were able to adapt to the situation and share the gym between a few different sports.

“[There’s] a pretty good relationship with all the coaches, so more than willing to [share the gym]…I’m all for people needing our gym to use it,” head varsity volleyball coach Sadie Kosciuk said.

There were many coaches who managed to see the bright side of the situation and used the heat to their advantage. Head varsity football coach Dan McMullen was one of these coaches. He took players to the wrestling room to not only practice, but to also teach them to be stronger both mentally and physically.

“If anything…for us, I feel like we had the advantage because we didn’t take it easy, we were able to get tougher mentally and physically…we made it [practice] tougher,” said McMullen.

This is not to say that there were no problems practicing during the week. While conditioning might have worked for some sports, it didn’t work for all sports. Tennis had a lot of new girls who hadn’t played before and this week was detrimental to helping them with their skills and getting them in a good place to play matches the next week.

“For tennis, we only have 10 girls and only two of them had ever played before…we needed practice swinging a racket and we can’t really do that inside,” said head varsity tennis coach Jonathan Flaxbart.

Despite the challenges that were met that week, all of the coaches worked really hard to make sure that their players didn’t miss out on practice time in order to be ready for upcoming events. This small problem showed the dedication that coaches have to their sports and players and even showed how well our coaches can work together in order to make sure all sports have the chance to practice.

“There’s a great relationship with the coaches all around here, which is really good,” Kosciuk said.