Tornadoes latest impediment to start of fall practices for DeKalb County teams

Set to have practices ahead of a fall season for the first time in two years, DeKalb County football teams ran into another roadblock Monday: severe storms that brought multiple reported tornadoes.

“Nothing’s been normal for 18 months,” DeKalb coach Derek Schneeman said. “Why not throw a little more adversity in.”

Multiple touch-down tornadoes reportedly were spotted near Clare, Malta, Sycamore and Fairdale in DeKalb County, the National Weather Service confirmed Monday, although the confirmed number isn’t yet known and will be assessed by the NWS in the coming days.

The NWS also issued a tornado warning for about 90 minutes in big chunks of the county, including DeKalb and Sycamore.

The Barbs started practicing outside, although Schneeman said that lasted for only a couple of minutes before lightning drove them into the fieldhouse. After about 90 minutes of a scheduled two-hour, 30-minute practice, a shelter-in-place order was issued and the team had to stay in the locker room.

“The guys were good,” Schneeman said. “We had to just hunker down in the locker room for 45 minutes or so. It was kind of a mad scramble going from practice to the sirens are on. But the guys handled it well. It’s kind of par for the course.”

Sycamore, where a lot of the tornadic activity happened Monday, also got in about 90 minutes of a scheduled three-hour practice.

Coach Joe Ryan said the team started outside as normal, but lightning drove them in before the shelter-in-place order came down. The Spartans were able to watch some film and had some small meetings during the duration of the warning.

“It was productive, but it was certainly not the production we wanted today,” Ryan said. “You have to roll with the punches. It can’t just be coach-speak that you talk about adversity and then when you have adversity you have trouble facing it. It’s one day. We’ll come back tomorrow, and we’ll be fine.”

Ryan said the players were calm.

“Kids don’t worry about that stuff,” Ryan said. “They don’t. Some of them just wanted to drive home. That’s kids. Sometimes we have to save them from themselves, and I guess we did that a little bit today. But it was a good time for them to be around each other. So they hung out, played some games and do the stupid things kids do and made the best out of a bad situation.”

In Kirkland, the community actually had two tornado warnings – one was earlier as part of a warning that affected the Cherry Valley area.

The two warnings ended up wiping out most of what was supposed to be Nick Doolittle’s first practice as head coach of Hiawatha. Right at the start of the 3:30 p.m. practice, lightning drove the team inside. Then the tornado warning led to the shelter in place right as warmups were taking place.

Doolittle said they got a quick walkthrough in between the two warnings but not much.

“We kind of missed out on the first day, but we at least got to go over a few things,” Doolittle said. “It wasn’t the ideal first day.”

Doolittle said the team was excited to get going Monday.

“They were bummed,” Doolittle said. “But they’re looking forward to tomorrow. They know we have to make up a day, and they are excited to finally get to work.”