This past weekend, 96 teams from San Diego to Boston ventured to the desert oasis of Phoenix for their annual Saguaro Cup softball tournament only to find that tournament play had been postponed and was in danger of being cancelled. Heavy rains on Thursday and Friday prompted the City of Phoenix, which manages all of the parks in the city that had been reserved to host the tournament, to cancel games because of unsafe conditions.

“One of the things that I explained to the coaches was that when we get rain here in Phoenix, it’s not like when you get rain anywhere else,” Sam Atencio, the Open Division Commissioner of the Cactus Cities Softball League, told the Gay & Lesbian Times. “Just underneath the top layer of ground we have a layer of clay and when it rains like that it doesn’t soak into the ground, so it sits in pools and puddles. We don’t get much rain here and we got a very large amount Thursday evening and Friday, and they thought the fields would not be ready to play on Saturday.”

When the weather cleared up and the sun came out on Saturday morning, members of the Cactus Cities Softball League, the tournament sponsors, were out with city officials to locate fields that were in playing condition. While all of the Women’s Division games were cancelled because the fields were literally under water, the fields selected for the Open Division were in playing condition.

Tournament directors went to work reorganizing the tournament schedule to compensate for a late start. Play was originally scheduled to begin at 9:00 a.m. with each team playing three round robin games to seed them for a double elimination tournament. The revised schedule had play beginning at 6:00 p.m., with each team only playing in two seeding games and double elimination play beginning at 9:00 p.m.

“We had our entire board; we also had some help from the NAGAAA assistant commissioner on the open side, and Jim Costello from San Diego, who sat down with us and helped work out the brackets in about two hours and got it typed up and out to the coaches so everyone could be on the fields by 5:30,” Atencio said.

Saturday night’s games went until midnight at many of the fields, but by 8:00 a.m. Sunday morning the tournament was back on track and games were completed on time, with only the C and CC division outcomes affected by the new tournament schedule.

“Our original intent was to have an Upper C and a Lower C,” Atencio explained. “When that didn’t work out for our makeshift tournament, we just broke the teams up into two with no real determination as to who’s the upper division and who’s the lower division. We really didn’t have time to because the C Division was so large and we had to play at two complexes.”

In the open division, San Diego only had two teams that placed in the five levels of play in the Saguaro Cup. Bourbon Street Crush took second place in the A Division, losing to Doin’ it with 2/D2 of San Francisco. In the C Division, Moby Dick’s Trojans took third place.

Softball will be taking a break this week in San Diego, in observance of Easter Sunday. Games will resume on Sunday, April 18, at the Poway Sportsplex and at Hourglass Park in Mira Mesa.