Trenton Catholic Academy basketball star Malachi Richardson has six inches, gobs of athletic ability and one cool hairdo more than me, but he and I have something in common.
At one point, we were both high school seniors—enchanted with Syracuse University—who spent our final months in Hamilton worrying about snow we wouldn’t see for a year.
During an interview for this month’s Hamilton Post cover story, Richardson told sports editor Samantha Sciarrotta his biggest worry about his impending move to Central New York wasn’t playing for the SU men’s basketball team in front of 35,000 people at the Carrier Dome, not the demands of college classes or the move 270 miles away. It wasn’t working with Hall of Fame curmudgeon Jim Boeheim.
No, it was snow.
“I’m nervous about the cold weather and the snow,” Richardson told Sciarrotta. “It’s crazy up there, how much snow they really get. I think that’s going to be something I need to prepare for.”
I have news for Richardson and any other high school senior getting ready to ship up to Central New York—you don’t prepare for snow in Syracuse, you merely survive.
I knew I would be in for something special when I overheard a pair of students talking about lake-effect snow during my first visit to Syracuse; it was mid-August. Still, I somehow convinced myself the snow couldn’t be as terrible as everyone insisted it was, and I was back on campus the next August as a freshman.
The first snow that year—Oct. 1, 2003—proved that would be a misguided notion. We received 181.3 inches of snow that winter. That’s more than 15 feet of the white stuff.
Since 2000, Syracuse has only had two winters of less than 100 inches of snow, and on average receives six times more snow more per year than Hamilton.
The Upstate folks try to make a game out of it by holding a contest called the Golden Snowball. Cities like Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Albany “compete” to have the most snow during the course of the winter. Local TV stations would do segments on the Golden Snowball race. The daily newspaper in town—no longer a daily in print—would dedicate the back page of the sports section to the weather, with a nice chunk of it saved for the latest Golden Snowball numbers.
But, really, it’s hardly ever a contest. In 53 years, Syracuse has won it 39 times. The wind whipping down off Lake Ontario seems to always have Syracuse in its path. With the wind comes lake-effect snow.
Now, to have survived a Syracuse winter is a badge of honor for SU students and alumni. But there’s a legend going around that suggests we may not be as hardy as our boasting would make us seem. This rumor says there is a network of underground tunnels at Syracuse University that connect the buildings, allowing pedestrians to make their way across campus without ever going outdoors. This is FALSE, and any current Syracuse student has the salt-corroded pants to prove it. (I had to throw out at least one pair of jeans a year because the road salt would have eaten holes in them by spring.)
This is the cold truth—we had to walk to class outside in our holey pants, and the university administration rarely thought twice about making us do it. During my four years on campus, the university only cancelled classes once, for half a day. Before that, no classes had been cancelled by snow since the Blizzard of 1993; that storm dumped 42 inches of snow on Syracuse.
I didn’t get to enjoy the February 2007 snow day because I had eaten something bad the day before, and spent my time dealing with it. I emerged a few days later to find all the snow in the parking lot pushed around and on top of my 1998 Honda Civic. It took me and some friends more than an hour to dig the car out.
So, yeah, there’s a lot of snow. But you get used to it, which is what happens when you get two to four inches of snow every day between Thanksgiving and Easter, with the occasional May blizzard thrown in. Yes, you can get used to 10 feet of snow.
You gradually accept that class won’t ever be cancelled. By February, you don’t notice the snow anymore, and go about your business, as the army of salt trucks, plows and street sweepers keep the roads and sidewalks clear. It’s not like in Hamilton where it may snow on Monday but the plows come Thursday to unveil a nice ice hockey rink that used to be your road.
I promise snow will be the least of Richardson’s worries at Syracuse University. If I were him, I’d be more worried about the frosty glares he’s bound to get from his future coach, Jim Boeheim. It happens to everyone in Richardson’s position. The dirty looks arrive every year, just about the same time as the snow.
I have some experience with that, too, but maybe that’s a story for another day.
