Before tonight’s game at TD Ameritrade Park, the late Lou Spry will be recognized. The former NCAA executive, connected with the College World Series since the 1960s, died in March at his home in Louisiana. He was 78.
Lou Spry worked his first College World Series in 1967. He began as the media coordinator. Walter Byers, the former NCAA boss who died earlier this month, convinced Spry to succeed Gene Duffy, who handled publicity and just about everything else in athletics at Creighton. Hired on by the NCAA less than a year earlier, Spry was still wet behind the ears.
“Duffy passed away and the job fell to me, which I was scared to death about to start with, but Walter said I was the guy he wanted to do it.”
Spry observed what he felt was already a well-oiled operation. He attributed it to the efforts of Jack Diesing Sr. who formed College World Series, Inc., around that time.
“Jack was not a baseball fan. He had never been, I don’t think, to a College World Series game when he took the job even though we had been in town since 1950. But he was a business man.”
Jack Diesing Jr., the current president of College World Series Inc., confirmed Spry’s perception.
“Among all things about Lou, he was very astute person because that was an accurate statement. When my dad was asked to take over the organizing committee that host the College World Series here in Omaha, in 1963, the first words out of his mouth were, ‘I don’t want to do it. I don’t know anything about baseball.”
But Diesing Jr. added that his father morphed into loving college baseball, which enhanced the partnership between Omaha and the NCAA.
Omaha was almost like home to Spry, the son of a Nebraska sharecropper. In 1971 Spry became the event director of the College World Series and held that post for eight years. Dennis Poppe, who later became the NCAA administrator before retiring two years ago, says Spry’s management style rubbed off on him.
“He set the trend for understanding what the College World Series is all about. It’s not your average event. You’ve got to understand the community. You have to understand what it means to the townspeople.”
Most important, Spry stressed listening instead of dictating procedures, according to Poppe.
“You’re going to come in and develop relationships and you’ll work it out. It was a little more of a folksy approach to it and that fit my background, so he set the stage for me, I guess.”
After Poppe took over, he wanted Spry to stay aboard as the official scorer for as long as he wanted. Spry traveled to Omaha every year until 2013. Though physically unable to attend the last two years, Spry’s feelings toward the College World Series never changed from how he felt in 1967.
“I thought I died and gone to heaven. I was working at the College World Series and I didn’t think things got any better than that.”
After his death, Lou Spry’s ashes were spread at the site where Rosenblatt Stadium once stood, and around home plate and the pitcher’s mound at TD Ameritrade Park.