Due to one field not being playable, there has been some changes in the Big East/Big Ten Challenge this weekend.
Here are the Illini Games scheduled:
Friday, 6:30pm Illinois at Iowa Jack Russell Stadium
Saturday 6:30pm Illinois at Notre Dame McKechnie Field
Sunday 12:00 noon West Virginia at Illinois Naimoli Complex
Big Ten Hardball has the full updated schedule for the BIG EAST/Big Ten Challenge Tournament.
So Illinois will be opening 2009 against a Big Ten team. Intuition told me that this game wouldn’t count in the Big Ten standings but I checked with the Assistant Sports Information Director to make sure my hunch was correct. It was.
One more point. I don’t know for sure but I can only guess that if a field isn’t playable, it’s due to weather. This isn’t a good omen. Illinois baseball fans from last year will remember how much trouble we had with Mother Nature last year. I don’t have a fixed number but we had countless games (and even series) canceled, postponed, and suspended due to the weather.
Hopefully, this is a anomaly.