Joe Vaszily
Episode 153
3 JAN 2022
He has been an NCAA women’s basketball referee since 2004 and has been officiating since working intramural games in 1994 at the University of Scranton. Along the way he has officiated in a number of conferences and in 2018 worked his first national championship. He has also been a part of eight consecutive Final Fours. As a student-athlete he played basketball, and then in his 20s he ran three marathons.
Notable guest quotes:
“(I) went to Catholic grade school and Catholic high school. We lived about a mile from the church… and really the church was where we spent a lot of our time.”
“I had two jobs once I was old enough to work. One was, I was the evening receptionist in our parish rectory.”
“Over the course of the last 25 years or so the Jesuits have had a profound impact on me.”
“Staten Island has a huge CYO — Catholic Youth Organization — program, and, really, some guys from Blessed Sacrament who had been officials — who probably refereed me when I was playing — they knew that I was officiating intramurals and they just said to me, ‘You need to start doing CYO’.”
“I look back on it now and the Lord blessed me with two great careers.”
“Truly the Lord blessed me with the grace, as I look back on my careers, to be able to officiate and work a full-time job for as long as I did and the amount of games that I did. It was God’s grace that carried me through.”
“We should never think less of ourselves because the Lord loves us and He knows that we’re sinful by our nature from the very beginning of time but yet the Lord still loves us and He’s always chasing after us.”
“We have opportunities to minister in our vocation; that’s in officiating and that’s in sales, whatever it is… And when you think of it that way, you start to think that, ‘It’s not just about me. It’s about who I’m serving’.”
“I make sure that I’m reading and reflecting on God’s Word every day.”
“When I begin the day with a prayer of gratitude, my heart is set in the right place.”
