With hard work, talent, and a commitment to the fundamentals, Dennis Owens has prevailed over his peers to reach Kentucky state tournaments in both baseball and football. Is Owens some sort of athletic phenom along the lines of Bo Jackson or Deion Sanders? Not quite, but his accomplishments may be just as impressive, if certainly much less heralded.
Owens, who has lived in Glasgow most of his life, has reached those state tournaments as an official. Whether calling balls and strikes or blowing a whistle, Owens has excelled during nearly 20 years as a high school sports official and earned the respect of area coaches, players and fellow officials.
“My philosophy has always been to be so low-key that nobody remembers who the officials were,” says Owens. “We won’t get any attention if we’re doing the job we’re supposed to do, which is to keep kids safe and keep the pace of the game moving. Everybody has more fun when everything is moving.”
He is being much too humble, says Phil Burkeen, the Southcentral Kentucky Umpires Association scheduling director who has known Owens since he started umpiring baseball in 1997.
“His best quality is that he’s a very professional person who has that unteachable ability to relate to athletes and coaches,” Burkeen says of Owens. “People respect that about him.”
Maybe Owens relates to athletes and coaches because he and his family members have been in those shoes. A standout basketball player at Temple Hill and Barren County high schools, Owens went south to play junior college basketball at Florida College near Tampa after graduating from BCHS in 1976.
After moving back to Glasgow and working at R.R. Donnelly for a couple years, Owens moved to Fort Myers, Florida and worked building houses with his father-in-law, a general contractor. It was in Florida that he first got a taste of officiating.
“I started coaching Little League baseball,” recalls Owens, who has three children. “To be a coach in Fort Myers, you were required to umpire six games. I started umpiring, but I did more than six games because I enjoyed it so much. The more I did it, the more I enjoyed it.”
When he moved back to Glasgow in 1996, one of the first things Owens did was check into becoming a high school sports official. He went to a meeting for baseball umpires and met Burkeen, who helped him get started in umpiring.
“It was pretty demanding,” Owens says of his start as an umpire. “When the schedule came out, I had a pretty good varsity schedule. I called with a lot of very good umpires, and I enjoyed being around the kids.”
So much so that he then looked into being a football official. Owens paid his dues before he got to wear the striped shirt under the Friday night lights.
“My first year in football I did all junior varsity and middle school games,” he recalls. “The following year I was asked to join a veteran crew and do varsity games.”
Owens has been doing baseball in the spring and football in the fall ever since that start in 1997. Along the way, he has earned a reputation for fairness and professionalism that led to being asked to work three state baseball tournaments and a couple of state-championship football games.
His judgment and his players-first approach are reasons that Owens has reached such heights as an official, says Burkeen.
“He has good judgment, and he handles pressure well,” says Burkeen. “He has an ability to handle difficult situations in ways that are best for everybody. I wish I had 45 Dennis Owenses. I would be in good shape.”
How well does Owens handle difficult situations? So well that he has never ejected a coach from a game and has only ejected two players, both for malicious contact in baseball.
“I have two brothers who were coaches, so I know the pressure that coaches are under,” Owens explains. “It has never been a problem for me to give a coach a lot of leeway and let them vent.”
As a former player, Owens has never lost sight of what high school sports are all about, and he believes that has helped him as an official.
“Sports are all about the kids,” Owens says. “It’s their game, their time in life. When I played, the games were some of the best times I have had in my life. As an official, I have always tried to let the kids and the coaches do their thing. In football, I don’t want to throw flags unless I have to. I hate watching games that are full of flags. It takes all the fun out of the game.”
Owens has had his fun too. He recalls umpiring a district championship game in which future Major Leaguer Joe Blanton threw a no-hitter for Franklin-Simpson, and he remembers working the exciting 2007 Class A state championship football game in which Beechwood defeated Lexington Christian 38-35.
Such postseason highlights are a thing of the past for Owens, who says he is working strictly regular-season games now.
“I’ve had my share,” he says. “It’s time to step aside for someone younger. I have seven grandchildren, and three of them are already involved in sports. I don’t know that I’ll quit anytime soon, but I’m going to start scaling back. The younger officials can do it a whole lot better than I can.”
