OMAHA (KMTV) — Michael Uhland has spent much of his life around the baseball diamond.
"I played for 8 years when I was younger," said Uhland. "I coached on and off for 30 years. I was a catcher, so if you caught the whole game, you had a good day."
Uhland, an Air Force veteran, will soon be back behind the plate but in a different role.
"I always said that once I retire, I was gonna become an umpire," Uhland said. "As a catcher, you've got an umpire behind you. So you get to hear exactly everything that he's calling for. And you sometimes wonder: one of the reasons you want to become an umpire is 'I think I can do better than him.'"
With the ongoing umpire shortage, the nonprofit "Protect the Game" partners with local organizations to train military veterans, who answered the call to serve to now make the calls all at no cost to them.
"To have the individuals that have the personality, the motivation, to have service for others to be able to use that in the sporting world," said Sean Johnston, who works with the Premier Sports Officials Assocation. "Because that's what we really are as sports officials. We are there for the players, the coaches, to keep the game safe, to keep the game fair."
"Organized sports and the military they work off of one another," said Uhland. "It's where they came from. Which is why veterans do a good job when it comes to umpiring, coaching and even being players."
With two of those three boxes already checked, Uhland is excited to turn the triple play.
"I've been away from the game for about five years," Uhland said. "And it's bad. So now that my kids are all grown and my grandkids are now playing. Just sitting on the other side of the fence is a little different, so I want to be on this side of the fence once again."
After getting a few games under their belts, these new umpires will put their training to the test in the upcoming Omaha Slumpbuster Tournament.
With about 700 teams expected over the course of two weeks, it'll be all hands on deck starting June 14th.
