Milton High School Basketball Teams Pivot for Practices and Games as the Isaias-Damaged Gym Stays Unusable
Three weeks after Hurricane Isaias tore a section of roof off the gym and damaged its floor, Milton's basketball teams will start their season as guests - practicing and playing around a home court that is still out of service.
Milton High School's gym is still unusable, and its basketball season will start somewhere else. WEAR reported on Monday that the gym - which lost a portion of its roof to Hurricane Isaias, with damage to the floor - remains out of service, and that the school's basketball teams are being forced to pivot for both practices and games as the season arrives.
The damage is a matter of record from the storm itself. In the days after Isaias came through the Panhandle in October, photographs provided to the Pensacola News Journal showed the Milton gym filled with water after the winds ripped its roof off overnight - large patches of standing water inside the building, and pieces of the roof and other debris scattered outside it. A gym floor that has stood in storm water is not a floor a school can simply mop and reopen, and Monday's report is the confirmation that the recovery has not reached the basketball court in time for the season.
What has not been announced - at least in anything the desk could verify on Monday evening - is the shape of the workaround: where the Panthers will practice day to day, which gyms will host the home dates on the schedule, and how long the repairs run. Those answers belong to the school and the Santa Rosa County district, and Pensacola Watch News will report them when they are given. What is settled is the fact the season starts with: one of the Panhandle's proudest home gyms is dark, and Milton basketball opens its year on the road in every sense that matters.
