By STEVE KRAH
Mark Yoder played for a state championship football team and was part of a competitive baseball program in high school.
He was on a conference title-winning football team in college.
He served in the U.S. Army and is still attached as a civilian worker.
Yoder knows about being part of a team.
He also knows that there are more than two teams on the field or court for each game.
There are the opponents and there are the game officials.
“Umpiring equates to playing sports and the military,” says Yoder. “On the field, you’re a team.”
Yoder, a 1985 graduate of Penn High School in Mishawaka, Ind., who lives in Powhatan, Va., and works at Fort Lee, has earned the right to umpire at the 2021 NCAA Division III World Series June 4-9 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
CWS games will be played at Perfect Game Field at Veterans Memorial Stadium — home of the Cedar Rapids Kernels of the High-A Central League (formerly known as the Midwest League).
Yoder has umpired NCAA Division I and Division III colleges along the East Coast from Pennsylvania to North Carolina for 16 years. He works Old Dominion Athletic Conference, Mid-Atlantic Conference, Colonial Athletic Association and Atlantic 10 Conference games and has worked out-of-league Atlantic Coast Conference contests.
In 2016, Yoder was a D-III regional alternate. He made it onto the field in the postseason in 2017 and 2018 and was a regional and super regional crew chief in 2019 — the year that D-III adopted the D-I postseason model of regional, super regional and College World Series.
Yoder had noticed that super regional crew chiefs tend to be assigned to the D-III CWS the next year. The COVID-19 pandemic ended the 2020 regular season early and took away the postseason.
This past week it was confirmed that Yoder is part of the D-III College World Series crew.
The son of Mishawaka residents Keith (who was on the Penn-Harris-Madison school board) and Virginia Yoder (who was a teacher) and brother of Granger’s Kevin Yoder, Mark was a youngster traveling with his father to basketball referee gigs when he got his first taste for athletic officiating.
At Penn, Mark Yoder was a tight end for Indiana Football Hall of Fame coach Chris Geesman and a junior on the Kingmen’s first state champion in 1983.
A football assistant and head football coach at Penn was Chuck Wegner, also an Indiana Football Hall of Famer.
“I love Geez,” says Yoder. “As a kid you don’t realize what you learn from your coaches. They just instilled such a mentality of teamwork and counting on each other.
“(Geesman) was hard, but he was always fair. I got to play because I worked hard or didn’t get to play because I didn’t work hard.”
Yoder remembers Wegner’s policy with game officials.
“He would never let us mouth off to an umpire,” says Yoder. “That was a huge no-no. He would never tolerate that.
“Occasionally he would chirp about a pitch. But I don’t ever remember Chuck getting silly with officials.”
Current Penn head coach and Indiana High School Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Famer Greg Dikos coached Yoder as a junior varsity player and then led the Kingsmen for much of his senior season while Wegner was away on medical leave.
Through it all, Yoder was able to apply criticism as an athlete and get better.
“It’s no different in umpiring,” says Yoder.
After graduating from Penn in 1985, Yoder played two football seasons at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Ind., for RHIT Hall of Famer Scott Duncan.
The Fightin’ Engineers won what is now the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference in 1986.
When an injury ended his gridiron playing career, Yoder transferred to Indiana State University in Terre Haute and earned his degree.
On an ROTC scholarship and commissioned to the Army, Yoder was an intramural basketball official for $10 a game at Rose-Hulman and also worked other sports at Rose and ISU.
Yoder took a hiatus from officiating while focusing on his military career. The last few years of active duty, he found himself in Germany and served Department of Defense high school baseball, basketball and volleyball.
When he arrived back in the U.S. and the Richmond, Va., area Yoder aligned with the Old Dominion Umpires Association — a group that trains and supports baseball officials.
He contacted ODUA commissioner Greg Walls and was invited to work a fall scrimmage at the University of Richmond in the fall of 2008.
“I had no umpire gear (it was still on a boat coming from Germany,” says Yoder. “I showed up in shorts and a collared shirt.
“They were running three-man. I had never worked in the three-man system. We never did that in Europe.”
Yoder was made the third base umpire.
“I was a fish out of water,” says Yoder, who soon learned three-man mechanics with the help of a veteran umpire.
He also got to polish his two-man techniques at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va.
Yoder spent the winter of 2008-09 honing his skills and worked his first high school game in the spring at the Class 3A varsity level (the highest in Viriginia at the time).
He figured he has earned his way.
“If you have the skills, ability and game management you’re going to work,” says Yoder. “It’s not the good old boys club.
“You can’t hide a good umpire and you can’t hide a bad umpire. I had enough potential to keep an eye on.”
Walls was not only high school commissioner for the ODUA but supervisor of umpires for the D-III ODAC.
In 2009 and 2010, Walls gave Yoder high school and American Legion ball assignments with umpires who did college baseball. At the same time, the Indiana native attended two-man camps as well as a three-man camp ran by Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Umpires.
Yoder worked junior college games in 2011 and 2012 and his first D-III game in 2013. By 2015 he was doing almost a full conference season. After that came some D-I assignments.
Yoder has four children all living in northern Indiana — Andrew (Southwest), Sarah (New Paris), Zac South Bend) and Matthew (Elkhart). Matthew Yoder just enlisted in the U.S. Army.
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