Smoke clears just in time for Glacier football opener

Mother nature must be a football fan.

The smoky haze that blanketed the Flathead Valley for most of the last week kindly dissipated shortly before kickoff to allow Glacier and Helena to square off at Legends Field without incident Friday night.

Zero-week games at Class A and B around the Valley were postponed earlier in the day but at Class AA, where the schedule offers little to no flexibility, Glacier was committed to wait all the way up to the scheduled 7 p.m. start time to make a decision.

“We got out here at 5:30 and you couldn’t see the mountains,” referee Chris Parson said.

“But by the time we came back out at 6:30 it had completely cleared up.”

“When we first got down for the game I was worried about it,” Glacier head coach Grady Bennett added.

“When it got to be 6:45-ish I started feeling pretty hopeful and it started to clear around kickoff.”

Parson confirmed an earlier report that the Montana High School Association gave officials the discretion to “take extra timeouts and give players more time to recover between plays,” but the smoke cleared so completely that Parson nor the coaches deemed extra breaks necessary.

Glacier lost the game 23-17, and afterwards Bennett was not willing to attribute his team’s uneven performance to the Wolfpack’s altered practice schedule the last week-plus.

“The only thing I was worried about was conditioning because we couldn’t condition as much when we were outside,” Bennett said. “It affected us a little bit but not terribly, and in the first game you’re going to see that no matter what.”

Glacier’s junior varsity game was canceled earlier in the afternoon when conditions were worse.

According to the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, the particulate concentration in the Valley was in the unhealthy range most of the afternoon but improved significantly between 7 and 8 p.m.