It snowed!

[Kevin]

For one thing, they salt and sand the roads which helps immensely.

You get the salt and sand here, but the big difference is, while a town of 15,000 people in Missouri might have a total of 3 plows with the sand/salt spreaders, a town that size in Wisconsin will have 8 or more, plus a couple dozen folks with plows on their personally owned vehicles, and can much more rapidly deploy. There also aren't nearly as large of salt and sand stores. You only expect about 3 or 4 real snowfalls here in mid MO. You expect dozens or more in WI and MN. So a later in the year fall can mean there isn't anything left to spread.

I also can't blame them for not keeping much more equipment. It costs just sitting there doing nothing and when 6 inches of snow can be melted off 3 days later it really isn't as big of a deal. You do get more ice here than farther north as well and it is harder to drive on. But again as mentioned even if you want to practice you get a day or two after the storm, before nature removes it, to get that time in. So yeah I do chuckle at some of the issues folks have here, but it's not like there aren't very sensible reasons for it. Growing up in WI, there was snow cover on the ground for months at a time. I practiced (and played) in parking lots, I got to drive on roads that were in all states of clearance many times. You just don't get that here.