Generally when baseball umpires make the news, it’s going nose-to-nose with a manager who has a beef with one of their decisions. But a trio from Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows are getting attention for excellence in their craft.
Matthew White, Shawn Bird and Shawn Schaefer have all been honoured by the B.C. Baseball Umpires Association this year.
Schaefer is a Pitt Meadows resident who is all baseball, and was chosen as the 2018 Most Inspirational National Umpire.
Schaefer is the Grass Roots coordinator for Baseball B.C. He was also a college pitcher, who played in the U.S., and has been a coach with the Douglas College program.
He is regularly involved with the Ridge Meadows Minor Baseball Association, running clinics for players and new coaches, and helping with skills assessments.
Bird is the winner of the Abe Shapiro Mentorship Award.
His family is baseball royalty in Port Coquitlam, and Bird named for his parents, Donna and Walter, to recognize their contributions to minor baseball. There is also a Walter Bird Memorial Tournament in memory of his father.
“The Bird family bleeds baseball,” said Melissa Nisbet, the special events coordinator for RMMBA. “Shawn approached us after the new executive took over in 2017. He was instrumental in redoing the umping in our association with his counterpart, Dan Hebransen.
“They have mentorship programs, an umpire of the week program with Brownies Chicken, and they are training our umps early on and instilling the confidence for our young umpires to ignore any over-enthusiastic armchair umps on the sidelines.”
White was chosen the junior umpire of the year for the Lower Mainland East. He is also a competitive ball player
There have generally been 10 awards handed out each year by the umpires association, and another nine junior umpire awards – one for each zone. But they are only awarded when the board of directors see worthy recipients.
