Bill Cleary quickly recalled that March 1993 morning when a record-breaking blizzard shut down Pittsburgh International Airport and closed main roads.

Most people took heed of the newscasts and stayed home.

Cleary was on a school bus.

His knees were knocking, his anxiety was heightening and, admittedly, he was wondering if he would make it off that fish-tailing bus in one piece.

Cleary, and the rest of the Serra Catholic girls' basketball contingent, were bound for Pitt's Fitzgerald Field House and a WPIAL Class AA championship game against Geibel.

Despite then-WPIAL executive director Charles Heberling's insistence that 1993 day, officials from North Catholic and Seton-La Salle refused to play their Class AAA girls' final, scheduled for 12:45 p.m. That game and the other two finals scheduled for that day were postponed, even as Cleary's team and Geibel were forced to play, or forfeit.

Heberling's rationale was simple, as he told the Post-Gazette, "Buses skid every day, even when there isn't any snow."

To Cleary, it was a day that really woke him, and the rest of the WPIAL, to the concerns associated with team travel in poor weather conditions.

"I remember our players being scared that day," said Cleary, who is also Serra's athletic director. "And I remember I was scared, too. But I think we all look back at that and it was a day we see as one where we said, 'Hey, we better start thinking about the safety of these kids some more.' I think it was a day that turned out to be a positive because it brought a big issue to light."

High school sports fans who have been in Western Pennsylvania for any length of time in the winter months have probably experienced tricky travel, traversing snow-covered, ice-slicked roads to or from a contest ... or both.

There is no WPIAL policy pertaining to school cancellations and postponing athletic events that same day. In short, just because school is cancelled, that does not mean the WPIAL wants extracurricular activities that day to be called off. Each school district has its own policy, and can cancel events at its own discretion during the regular season, or allow them to be played the same day school is cancelled.

In WPIAL playoff games and matches, the WPIAL makes the decision to postpone games due to weather; the PIAA does the same for its playoff games.

"I do think many people do not understand that," WPIAL executive director Tim O'Malley said. "There are times when the roads might be in poor enough condition at the beginning of the morning to cancel school, but by the time the day moves along, conditions have improved and by the evening, it is fine for schools to hold events and teams to travel to other schools.

"The bottom line, and the big picture, is safety. When looking at everything, you have to remember that safety needs to prevail."

The subject of team travel safety was thrust to the forefront in late-February 2008 on a snowy night. Saint Joseph boys' basketball coach Kelly Robinson elected to have his team forfeit its PIAA Class A first-round playoff basketball game against Bishop Guilfoyle at Central Cambria High outside Johnstown due to his concern for the players safety.

For PIAA playoff games, site managers make the decision as to whether to call off games, and in the situation involving Saint Joseph, Ron Stempka, the athletic director at Central Cambria, was the site manager and didn't deem travelling too hazardous that night, even though roads were snow and ice covered between Saint Joseph's building in Natrona Heights and the game site in Ebensburg, Pa.

It was a decision to which Post-Gazette columnist Bob Smizik reacted in a March column: "Eight seniors from this tiny, close-knit school never got to play their last game. Bureaucratic idiocy deprived them of a final memory of a high school career."

Robinson agreed.

"We just weren't going to go, it was that simple," he said. "The roads were terrible and we, as adults, didn't need to put kids at risk. It was a decision I will never regret because I didn't want to put our kids in harm's way."

Many might have looked at it as a team simply not being able to get to Cambria County on a bus for a basketball game. To look deeper is to realize there were more components to the trip, partly because Saint Joseph is a private school and all of the students don't live in the same community. That is the conundrum that faces many private schools, and the big public schools that have enrollments that come from large geographic areas, when weather gets bad.

"People often forget there is more to this than just getting on the bus and going to the game and getting back on it and getting home," Robinson said. "There is the factor of kids, or parents, getting behind the wheel and getting them to school just to get on the bus from Hampton or West Deer or the community they live in our case.

"Then, afterward, sometimes you can get back to school very late and you pull into that school parking lot in the bus and young kids still have to get off that bus, get in their cars and make the drive home. I know that, ultimately, a lot of responsibility comes down on me."

As Serra's athletic director, and much of the discretion is left to Cleary when deciding whether or not to allow the games to go on a day when the weather is ugly.

He lives by a simple credo, one he said all athletic administrators should keep in mind: "We always have to remember that they are just games," Cleary said. "And we can just play them another day if we have to. They are just games; it isn't worth someone getting hurt or killed over."