By STEVE KRAH
People support prep sports in many ways.
A Huntington, Ind., couple — Bill and Sue Forgey — have been doing it my keeping score.
Working as a team, the Forgey scored the 2024 Indiana High School Baseball Coaches Association North/South All-Star Series for the ninth and final time, working the games at Huntington University’s Forest Glen Park Saturday and Sunday, June 22 and 24.
The South swept the three games.
At the request of IHSBCA executive director and Huntington resident Brian Abbott, the Forgeys also tracked the stats in Richmond (2014), Terre Haute (2015), Whiting (2016), Muncie (2017), South Bend (2018), Madison (2019), Marion (2022) and Lafayette (2023).
The couple have been married almost 40 years. All that time they lived in the same house 1 1/2 blocks from Huntington U.
“To be around such good kids and families are wonderful as well,” says Sue Forgey. “So it’s been a really great experience for us.”
Both have accounting backgrounds. Bill is retired from a bank and Sue works with testing data at Huntington North High School. The 2024-25 school year will be her 29th.
The couple is looking to gradually lessen their scoring responsibilities.
Between the two, they have assisted the HNHS Vikings for football, volleyball, basketball, gymnastics, swimming, wrestling and baseball. They began doing the latter sport in 2005.
“We have front row seat and most of those events so it’s it’s kind of exciting,” says Sue. “These kids work really, really hard to get to the level that they are and they’re very dedicated.
“So you know the families are very supportive of them.”
In their position, they get to meet coaches and game officials.
“It makes you feel good when officials walk up to you when you’re not even sitting there and call you by name,” says Bill. “99 percent of them are very good. They’re dedicated. They do a good job while people that sit behind us don’t necessarily agree with that.”
As scorekeepers, the Forgeys keep their allegiances to themselves in the heat of competition.
“You have to impartial vocally you can be partial all you want silently, but you can’t to voice that opinion,” says Bill.
It’s also important to note that these ballplayers are not big leaguers.
“People may disagree with how we score but when we started this 20-some years ago the idea at the time was said that you’ve got to remember these are high school kids, not pros,” says Bill. “You’ve got to score the game differently because a pro could do what a high school kid can’t.”
Both Forgeys have accounting backgrounds. Bill is retired from a bank and Sue works with testing data at Huntington North. The 2024-25 school year will be her 29th.
Baseball stats are kept meticulously with a Daktronics program. Bill calls out the play and Sue logs it on her laptop while also tracking on paper.
“We do it pitch-by-pitch and the program is a fabulous program because as I enter the stuff, it actually creates the stats based on what I enter creates a narrative,” says Sue.
“We could give it to a newspaper and they could print a story on it without even being here,” says Bill.
As he grew up on a farm near Lafayette, Bill became at Chicago White Sox. The tradition in his family was to be taken to your first game at 10.
“You grow up with black-and-white TV and you walk into a place like and everything’s green,” says Bill. “It’s like wow? It was always black-and-white. It was quite amazing. I’ve been a White Sox fan ever since rain or shine — mostly rain.”
Sue got her loyalty from her husband.
“I was not really wasn’t a big baseball fan until I married Bill,” says Sue. “It just kind of grew in our house and raised our children to be White Sox fans.”
Between the two, Sue and Bill have four children.
There are times when the couple attends a sporting event and there is not scorekeeping involved.
“It’s kind of hard to actually do that,” says Sue. “You know, we we are so involved with all the various sports at the high school level that you know, we go to to college game and it feels kind of weird to not actually be doing the stats.”
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