He’s 70 now, with specks of snow on the roof, and he was reminiscing in the afterglow of being inducted into the Louisiana USSA Hall of Fame for his softball officiating career.

“It started at an early age,” Alfred Rachal said of a career that started humbly enough.

“I was 16 and my coach W.C. Davis (then the head football coach and athletic director at Peabody) was in charge of a youth baseball program for the Rapides Parish Police Jury.” 

Davis needed an umpire, and he summoned Rachal, a talented baseball player. 

“He gave me a softball mask to wear,” he said, “only it was a baseball game.”

Thus started his 50-plus year love affair with officiating, a career he’s retired from now. Well, sort of.

The only time he officiates now is “when somebody doesn’t show up or is going to be late, and I fill in,” he said, “and that’s in the elementary/junior high leagues.” He gave up officiating high school sports a few years ago. 

A 1971 graduate of Peabody, where he helped the Warhorses win a state baseball title as an all-state senior, Rachal paid his rent during his years at Southern University in Baton Rouge with money he made from umpiring. When he wasn’t wowing folks with a college baseball career that saw him share SWAC Player of the Year honors as a senior in 1975, he was molding his future career as an official, umpiring American Legion baseball games and fast-pitch softball games.

He officiated basketball games for more years (38) than he did for either baseball or football (20-plus years in both), but he said baseball has always been his favorite. “In baseball, you get a chance to talk to the athletes,” he said, fondly recalling an impressive roll call of baseball players from this area whose games he called, including several future major league players. Terry Mathews. Warren Morris. Juan Pierre. Russ Springer. Greg Smith. To name a few. The list doesn’t end there.

“I called games when Terry Mathews was playing and, later, when he was an assistant coach at Menard,” Rachal said. “When I was at one of those games, I remember his mother calling out to me, ‘Alfred Rachal, you still officiating?’ And (pretending to tug on a leash) I said, ‘Look here, this is my seeing-eye dog.” 

He was holding court in his Pineville Community Center office, where he still works as the foreman for the Pineville Recreation Department. Soon, he was lamenting that “it’s hard to get people to officiate” these days.

“It’s not about a dollar sign,” he said, acknowledging that it is but shouldn’t be. “It’s about wanting a coach to know you’ve done the best you can” to provide a fair and impartial environment in which the athletes to compete. “You do your best between the lines for the student athletes. I tell the young ones all the time, ‘Folks don’t come to see you, they just want you to keep the peace with law and order.’”

That’s the way Rachal, a former high school baseball coach and football coach and athletics director, officiated. His worthiness as a baseball official was rewarded with assignments to officiate in four Dixie World Series events – two in Alexandria at Bringhurst Field, one in Bossier City and one in Lake Charles. He also officiated at college games in the area and, on one occasion, a professional minor league game for the Alexandria Aces.

“When a young ump working a game with me would ask, ‘What did I do wrong?’ or ‘What can I improve on?’, that’s what I enjoy. It makes me feel I can help,” he said. “It was like, ‘I got your back. I want you to have my back.’”

He saw at least three generations of athletes during his career as an official.

“I’ve had folks who see me on the street say, ‘You called my games when I played ball,’” he said. 

Rachal lost his wife of 40 years, Charlene Chark Rachal, to cancer last September, “and she died, on my baby daughter’s birthday,” he added. Alfred and Charlene had four children, two boys and two girls, and he said his youngest daughter, Charlathia, was “my first scorekeeper for basketball.” That’s a job she continues to do, he said, for the Northwood girls basketball games.

Any advice for today’s officials? 

“Treat the student-athletes like prize possessions on the floor,” he said, switching to basketball. “If they have a hostile moment, the first thing you’ve got to do is settle them down rather than kick them out. If you have a calm demeanor, that will kind of relax them. I used to tell them to keep their mouth shut. That mouth ain’t ever going to shoot the ball.”