This past Saturday, while many people were happily enjoying a night of football from their couches, Searcy resident and Harding alumnus Rick Lowe was enjoying it from the center of Kyle Field at Texas A&M.
Lowe, who is the president and general manager of Searcy Winnelson Plumbing Supplies during the workweek, officiates South Eastern Conference football games as an umpire on weekends.
Lowe graduated from Harding in 1977, and said that it was his former coach, Bisons legend John Prock, who got him into officiating by asking him to work pee-wee games after class one day.
“I was in coach Prock’s class — I don’t remember what class it was — and after class he called me up and said, ‘I need you Sunday to go work pee-wee football games.’ That’s kind of how I got started,” Lowe said.
Lowe went and slowly worked his way up the ladder of Arkansas officiating. After working both high school and small college ball simultaneously for 19 years and spending several years in Arena Football and NFL Europe, Lowe made the jump to the SEC in 1998 and has not looked back. He said he still remembers coach Prock’s encouragement along the way.
“When I was going up through the ranks, he was one of my biggest supporters,” Lowe said. “When I got to the SEC he was the second person I called. I called my wife first and him second. I’m not sure if he wasn’t more excited about it than I was.”
That is saying something, because for Lowe, nothing in his career quite compared to the atmosphere he was welcomed to every Saturday in the SEC.
“The opportunity to work in the SEC is unbelievable,” Lowe said. “The adrenaline rush walking out of that tunnel with hundreds of thousands of people screaming and cussing at you — there’s nothing like it. My ears ring for two days after a big game.”
Life as an official is not without its challenges, though. SEC officials are put through strenuous mental and physical preparation in order to be in top form on Saturdays. Once a week, Lowe takes a 10-question test over the increasingly complicated college football rulebook and also receives a packet from the SEC office detailing his personal performance in whatever game he worked the past weekend. It does not stop once the games end, either. After the whistle blows, Lowe and his team’s night is spent in meticulous film study of their calls throughout the game.
“It’s a dedication thing,” Lowe said. “(To get to the SEC) you’ve gotta be good, but you also have to be lucky to be seen at the right time by the right person, and once you get there, you work your tail off to stay.”
Lowe has managed to stay around for 16 years now, racking up 98 career games worked, three SEC championship games and a lot of scrapes and scars along the way. He recalled a game in Georgia’s Sanford Stadium where, after being struck by a facemask, his eye was bleeding so badly that the announcers “had basically picked the flowers for the funeral” before he was stitched up on the sideline; and then another at LSU, where he took a Tim Tebow helmet straight to the chin — a frightening thought for even the toughest SEC linebacker.
“I stayed in the game, though,” Lowe said. “I didn’t know where I was, but I stayed in the game.”
It’s certainly been a wild ride for Lowe, and it is a ride, he admits, that could be nearing its end.
“I’m 59 right now,” he said. “In a couple years, I’ll be done. I won’t want to be, but that’s just how it is.”
As he heads to Baton Rouge this Saturday to watch LSU tangle with Kentucky,
Lowe said that, at this point, it’s all about appreciating every moment, because he knows whenever he steps onto that field, he’s living every football fan’s dream: “Every time I walk down that tunnel, I thank the Lord and look around and think, ‘how did this old country boy from Texas get to be here?”
