By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
Basketball, football, and baseball. Randy Wetzel officiated them all. But baseball was always his true love. After 35 years of umpiring, including games in the Big 8 and Big 12, Missouri Valley Conference, and Big 10. Everything culminated when he was part of the umpiring crew of the 2011 College World Series in Omaha. Wetzel hung up his clicker in 2014. Last weekend, Wetzel was inducted into the Kansas Baseball Hall of Fame.
"That's what I grew up playing," he said. "I played college baseball and it was just always kind of the first love of mine because it was a family thing. My uncles and cousins all played. We got together and played. My mom's family was a family of 10 so I had 10 aunts and uncles, so we had a lot of cousins to play baseball."
After college, Wetzel coached basketball for three years at Ell-Saline High School in Brookeville, leading the Cardinals to a state championship in 1980.
"What a great town," he recalls. "The people were very supportive there. You look back on that with fond memories. I had great kids when I got there. When I got there, I had two sophomores that were really, really good. As a group, they just liked each other and did everything together. They basically just knew what each other was going to do before they did it."
Wetzel was working at a sporting goods store in Salina when some referees from his basketball games asked if he could umpire. The rest, as they say, is history. Out of the officiating game for 10 years now, Wetzel retired from Great Bend High School where he was assistant principal for 20 years. In 2023, he was elected to the USD 428 Board of Education. But he still fondly remembers his old officiating crew.
"They were the most enjoyable people I was around," he said. "I feel like they were my brothers. We did so many things together and had so many great opportunities - working the national championship game in Alabama. It came from hard work. It came from everybody being dedicated. When you have a crew of six or seven, you have to have everybody on the same page and everybody working for the same goal. We had that, and that's hard to find sometimes."
Being a former coach, Wetzel understood the psychology on the sideline. It made him a more patient official.
"There were key phrases like anything that began or ended with 'you,'" he said. "That would get you a flag or a (technical). I coached before I became an official so I kind of saw that side of it. You're not always mad at the official as much as you're mad at your team. I'm not going to see the official again so I'll yell at him instead of my team because I see them tomorrow."
The Hall of Fame Class of 25 also included the late Willie Ramsdell, who was schooled in Chanute before pitching for five seasons in the Major League; the late Don Carlile, who made the Liberal Bee Jays one of the top summer programs in the nation; Kansas City native Neil Allen who pitched 11 seasons in the big leagues; Uniontown High School graduate and former Wichita Shocker Shane Dennis; Steve Jeltz, who grew up in Lawrence and became the first African-American to play baseball at the University of Kansas before playing several seasons in the big leagues; and former Bishop Ward (Kansas City) coach Dennis Hurla, who won 352 games and made 17 state appearances in his 20 years with the program.