CHARLESTON — On October 4th, the city of Charleston, South Carolina recorded 3.64 inches of rain, breaking a 133-year-old single-day record (2.51 inches in 1893).
It just so happened that October 4th also marked the Celtics’ first day of training camp at The Citadel, turning a trip players had envisioned would bring good weather for golf into something more reminiscent of a monsoon.
At dinner on Sunday, the players received flash flood warning messages on their phones. At times, the downpour has been
so intense that it’s been almost painful to step outside.
“It’s been raining a lot,” said Mitchell Robinson, though he noted that wouldn’t deter him from further exploring the city. (He’s turning to TikTok for recommendations).
The weather forecast projected rainfall from Saturday afternoon, when the team arrived in South Carolina, all the way through Tuesday, their last day of camp. And though the rainfall didn’t physically impact the camp itself — the team is working out indoors, per usual, at the McAllister Field House — it meant that some, like golf enthusiast Mike Conley, decided to forgo planned golf excursions.
Payton Pritchard, on the other hand, is still trying to hit the course.
He hit up Conley, his go-to golf (and workout) buddy, eager to still make it work.
“He’s texting me in the middle of a flood warning, saying, ‘Hey, we can still get out there. It’s just sprinkling,’” Conley told CelticsBlog. ”I’m like, ‘Bro, it’s not happening today.’”
“Mike bailed,” Pritchard said.
Joe Mazzulla, unsurprisingly, loves the rain
Payton Pritchard has the support of his head coach, Joe Mazzulla, who is a self-proclaimed rain enthusiast.
“I do like the rain,” Mazzulla said. “Yeah, it’s nice.”
As such, at the Celtics team meeting on Monday morning, while it downpoured outside, Mazzulla told his players that they better not let another rainy day disrupt their plans. Mazzulla’s appreciation for the rain has become somewhat of an inside joke as historic precipitation continues.
“He said you got to prove how much you love something,” Conley recalled. “If you don’t play in the rain, you don’t physically love it — and I’m about to see how many guys on this team truly love what they do.”
The jury is still out regarding whether Pritchard, Conley, and the rest of the squad will hit the links in Charleston.
But the Celtics head coach continues to maintain that the weather should have no impact on their plans.
“It hasn’t,” Mazzulla said. “We play indoors, practice indoors. At the end of the day, it may impact some of the extracurricular stuff, which also — it shouldn’t. We’ve gotten everything we’ve needed to get out of Charleston so far, and we got two more days to do it.”
