Rain is nothing new at the Governor’s Cup. Rainouts are.

A string of afternoon thunderstorms forced the postponement of 20 games Friday night at Halls Ferry Park. While individual games have been postponed or suspended, it marked the first time since the tournament moved to Vicksburg in 1995 that an entire day’s worth of action has been lost.

Tournament director Ricky Mitchell said city maintenance crews will begin working on the fields early this morning, and was hopeful that games could start by 8 a.m. Friday night’s rainouts will start then, followed by the rest of today’s schedule. To keep games from going deep into the night, Mitchell said 10 or 15 minutes would be cut from the time limits of most games and any excessive down time between games would be eliminated.

“The theory is, by the time you play six games you save an hour over the course of the day,” Mitchell said. “If we start by 8 a.m., we’ll start the last game around 8:30 or 9 p.m. and be back on track by Sunday.”

The storms that rolled through Vicksburg shortly after noon on Friday left puddles scattered on all nine fields that were to be used. The flooding wasn’t terrible, but Mitchell said trying to repair it in time to play on Friday night would have done more harm than good. Around 4 p.m., the decision was made to push the schedule back.

“The whole idea behind the city crews not getting on the field is, it’s been so dry that they know it’ll just suck that water up. If you try to drag it, you’re going to tear it up,” Mitchell said. “The idea is to let the ground suck up all the water they can.”

With the late postponement, some teams didn’t get the message in time and started showing up for batting practice around 4 p.m. Most took the news in stride, with some players taking batting practice in the cages or playing catch in the parking lot while their coaches tried to learn when they’d play next.

“That’s part of it. That’s not the tournament’s fault, it’s Mother Nature’s fault,” said Stewart Boone, a coach for the 7-year-olds’ PSA Titans from Madison.

Lawrence Morris, a coach for the 13-year-olds’ Diamond Freaks team from Florence, had his players in the batting cage to prepare for a long day today. The Freaks’ Friday night game was postponed, and they will now play at 8 a.m., 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. today.

“If we don’t do well it could be the first and last game all in the same day,” Morris said. “We’ll try to keep plenty of fluids in them. The parents are bad enough when they get antsy. We don’t need to worry about the kids, too.”