When rain drowned out the SPAMtown Challenge this past Saturday, the Austin Greyhounds had a lot of work ahead of them.

Over 10 amateur baseball games were canceled Saturday and there was still the issue of setting up a semifinal and final.

So the Hounds did what anyone one do in such a jam — they improvised and created an eight-team tournament.

“We took all the teams that still would’ve had a chance to advance out of their pools and we picked a bracket out of the hat randomly,” Greyhounds manager John Frein said.

And with a random schedule came some random times and places. Since Riverland was occupied by a youth baseball tournament, the Challenge had three of it’s games moved to Hayfield. By the luck of the draw, Austin was one of those teams who played at Hayfield, with the first pitch being thrown around 8:30 a.m.

Although Cold Springs beat the Hounds 7-2, Frein wasn’t making any excuses.

“We’ve done this before. This is not our first barbecue,” he said. “We played at 8 a.m. on Saturday too, so I guess we like to challenge ourselves.”

Hayfield was chosen as a secondary site due to it’s location and the fact that Hounds were familiar with Hayfield’s head baseball coach Craig Selk.

Once the schedule was set, a little pressure was taken of the Hounds, who struggled all day Saturday with the decision of whether or not to try and play through the weather. In the end, there was just too much rain.

“It was very dramatic,” Frein said. “We’ve faced some major obstacles this weekend. You can’t control the rain, but I think the teams had a good time. We had some walkoff homers and walkoff hits. It’s good baseball and I think teams will want to come back.”

Brookings, S.D. was the only team who may have had a gripe as they won their first game, but were trailing when the rain hit on Saturday.

“If they would’ve come back to win, things might have been different,” Frein said.

To make matters worse, you couldn’t help but feel for the South Dakota team as they also had to play near midnight on Friday due to a travel conflict with their first round opponent, Eagle Valley, Ill. That game didn’t get done until around 2 a.m.

But the biggest tragedy was probably the cancellation of Saturday night’s games, which are usually the most popular contests of the Challenge.

“We would’ve liked to play Saturday for our local people because we had big plans. It’s just unfortunate,” Frein said.

However, things could’ve been worse — Sunday could’ve been rained out as well.

I think the SPAMtown challenge was given a lemon, and the Hounds made lemonade by setting up the eight team format.

When the Hounds look back on all the time they spent working on the fields before the flood, all the time they spent setting up the tournament, and all the time they spent reorganizing the tournament, they should be proud of themselves.