Ritzville Clock-watcher has long tenure

RITZVILLE - He knows about lapsed time probably better than anyone in the state. You might say he is the master of how time has flown, if not where it has gone, perhaps downfield.

Tony Vostral, 76, and a Ritzville resident, has been the football and basketball volunteer time-keeper since 1976 at Lind-Ritzville High School.

He's also been all over youth sports in many roles.

"I'm going to start my 49th year," Vostral said. "In football, I go out and talk to the referees before the game and ask whether anything's different, or whether they're doing anything different that I need to know about, watching from up in the stands, because they have signals that they have to give.

Vostral said if a pass is not complete he has to stop the clock.

"When the game starts, you don't start the clock until the ball is touched by someone on the other team" he said, "then you start it on the snap and you don't stop it again until they either have a first down or if they have an incomplete pass. So I start and stop the clock according to what's going on in the game."

With the new scoreboard at Lind-Ritzville High School, Vostral's responsibilities have grown as he must also, "keep track of first, second, third and fourth down," he said. "I keep track of the yards they need and I keep track of where the ball is, and I (work) with the announcers."

Vostral has been around long enough to have seen parents and grandparents of today's football youth out on the field for the Broncos.

"I guess some towns wouldn't have that opportunity to have multi-generation participation in sports, but we seem to have it here," he said. "We're in a small town and it's amazing how many people stick around. I know Odessa has the same kind of deal, and Harrington has the same."

"All the little towns were in the state B, before they split them apart, which was the worst thing the WIAA ever did," Vostral said. "There used to be just a B program, and so all the rivalries and everything were in there, and all the little towns when the state B tournament happened didn't matter whether your team made it around the bi-county and the Whitman County League. It didn't matter whether your team made it or not. Everybody came to that state tournament and brought their kids. They took them out of school."

"It didn't matter if your team got beat out, you stayed up there all four days to watch the games because there were huge rivalries between Whitman County and the back counties and every once in a while somebody from the other side of the state would come and it was fun to see whether we beat them," he said. "We knew they were really good teams."

Asked to remember a stand-out personality in his years of Ritzville sports, Vostral quickly mentioned Virg McCrady.

"He was a legend here," Vostral said. "He was the one who got me started as umpire in Little League, and he was one of the best basketball officials around the area, and he got me involved in officiating. He came to me and said, 'I think you would be a good umpire.' So umpiring, you get to know the kids a lot better than sitting in the tower and operating the clock."

Vostral discovered that a girls' basketball coach wasn't interested in hearing his advice not to wear out the players' legs with too much push during too much schedule.

"He looked at me and said, 'We only play one way, and that's the way we do it.'"

I said, "Fine."

"And they lost the semifinal game," Vostral said. "They couldn't make a basket in the second half because they were so tired."

"But that's different coaching philosophy," Vostral said. "That's the only thing I ever told the guys."