PASTORAL CARE IN THE OFFICIATING COMMUNITY By Van Oler
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s COVID-19’s reach expanded globally during the spring of 2020, people and the organizations of which they were members scrambled to adjust to everything from an avalanche of job losses to illnesses and, in some heartbreaking cases, deaths of family members and friends.
From left, active officials Scott Bach-Hansen, Audrey Price and Derek Shackleford provide a lending hand to members of the Cardinal Basketball Officials Association in northern Virginia.
One wouldn’t normally think of an officiating association as an organization equipped to or capable of providing its members with this kind of support during those turbulent and dismal months, particularly when one of the pandemic’s first major U.S. casualties was organized sports at all levels. What’s the purpose of an officiating association when there’s nothing to officiate? At least one association did, in fact, have a structure in place to provide valuable member support even as gyms were darkened and ballfields sat empty nationwide. Northern Virginia’s Cardinal Basketball Officials Association (CBOA),
also IAABO Board #255, “an organization of amateur basketball officials from all walks of life” according to its website, has a four-member Chaplain Team — active since 2016 — that provides members with pastoral care in good times and bad. The members of the Chaplain Team, seminarians all, are trained and experienced at providing pastoral care, which can include activities such as hospital visits, attendance at funerals/viewings and counseling. One of the primary tenets of pastoral care is the need to set aside one’s own desires in order to serve others. “They are a tremendously diverse group and you can
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