The History of the GLOA

In the early1970’s a group of officials who were stationed at the Naval Base formed the Great Lakes Officials Association. The group intended to provide officiating services to the Naval Base at Great Lakes. In time they expanded the Fort Sheridan and to the Naval Air Sation, Glenview Illinois.

The majority of the membership was active duty Navy and Army, with a few retires and reservists.

The group developed bylaws with a officer of President, Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer. Later the office of Secretary and Treasurer were combined. The sports included Slow Pitch Softball, Flag Football, Volleyball, Basketball and later wrestling and soccer.  Each sport elected a chairman who was responsible for training and assigning.

Records are not available for who held various offices. We believe  Earl Baldwin was the first President, followed over the years by, Andy Harlfinger, Dick Broadhurst, Don Collings, Dave Senf, Craig Ebel, George Grassmuck, Stan Pasiewicz and Dave Schopf.

We often hear from leagues that they want PATCHED officials. This term generally means the official has attended some kind of sport training, usually has paid a fee to  some national organization and is now “PATCHED”. Due to the turn over of our membership, requiring these requirement was expensive for newer officials. Along comes one of our early softball commissioners, Jeff Burk, who designed the GLOA Patch had all of our officials wear it. We had a training program sis our own assigning, so we were and still are  patched.

It was and still is challenging to identify our officials. Why not numbers? Jeff Burk strikes again. He wanted to assign numbers to each official so if a coach had a issue, positive of negative, they were to contact the commissioner of the leadership team and describe the situation and the officials number. It worked and still does.