West Valley’s new scoreboard is named after deserving ex-coach Jack Spring

The photo popped up in my inbox Monday afternoon.

It’s a cellphone photo of workers putting the finishing touches on the new scoreboard for the baseball field at West Valley High School. Across the top, the scoreboard reads “Jack Spring Stadium.” Underneath are the words “Home of the Eagles.”

In their first season on the renamed field, the Eagles won the Great Northern League’s regular season title – a fitting initial tribute to the former coach who led West Valley to its lone state baseball championship.

I hope the team was treated to a great many stories about the man after whom their home field is named. There are many around the community, and at West Valley High, who played for Jack and have plenty of great stories to tell. Many of them were at the field back in September, when the field was officially renamed – with Jack and his family front and center.

I hope they’ve all had the chance to meet Jack, shake his hand and thank him for all the years of service he gave to the school and to the baseball program.

But most of all, I wish these young players could go back in time and sit at Jack Spring’s knee and listen to his baseball stories the way I did back in the day. Because they were great stories.

I was a West Valley student back in the mid-1970s when the only thing wider than the neckties were the bell bottoms on our patch-pocket jeans. In those days, Elton John and Billy Joel were a lot younger, a lot thinner and had a lot more hair, and the Rolling Stones were, well, still the Rolling Stones, only younger.

And in those days Jack Spring was still young enough to throw a couple innings of long relief in the big leagues. Instead, he taught social studies. He was the kind of teacher students loved. He was engaging and enthusiastic about both his students and his subject matter.

But most of all, he was a great storyteller.

Truth be told, it was fairly common knowledge that, if you asked particularly good questions, you could get him started telling stories and, before you knew it, class would be over.

The truly great storytellers are a special breed. I hope they don’t become an endangered species, but some days I have my doubts. Listening to stories is a leisurely art and too many of us don’t take the time once we grow past the “once upon a time” phase of our lives.

The good storytellers keep an audience in the palm of their hand, hanging on every word. Without ever leaving their seat they can reach out, grab you by the imagination and carry you away.

A good story takes listening to a new level – an active level that engages multiple senses and kick-starts the imagination.

It was commonplace for students to drop by Jack’s room during lunch to listen to his baseball stories because those stories brought out the best of his storytelling craft. He’d regale us with tales of Ted Williams and Satchel Paige – both former major league teammates – or about what it was like to pitch to great players like Harmon Killebrew and Frank Howard.

During the summers, he would head off to coach short-season Class A baseball – and a young player named Kurt Russell. Not the Kurt Russell from the Goldie Hawn era or even the “Escape From New York” vintage, but the Disney movie star who doubled as a promising young ballplayer.

Some of the uniforms from those teams would make their way back to West Valley in those days, and they were put to good use as practice gear for Jack’s teams.

If this generation of West Valley Eagles could know some of those stories, they would understand why so many former Eagles showed up on a sunny fall afternoon to watch their field get a new name. And they’d know why those former players all chipped in to pay for that shiny new scoreboard.

And they’d know just how proud we are to see that new name up there for all to see.