GREENVILLE – Longtime OHSAA basketball, softball, baseball, soccer, and volleyball official Vern Pigg recently officiated the Lady Wave MVL volleyball win over Stebbins. The 78-year-old is coming off June 5, 2024, quadruple bypass heart surgery,
“Now I’m just doing volleyball, maybe I’ll do basketball, maybe,” he said. “Depends on how well I heal up from my surgery.”
“I didn’t have a heart attack,” Pigg continued. “I just had a few symptoms, shared it with the doctor, and the doctor said, let’s test you, and they found a couple of them pretty bad.”
The longtime OHSAA official is a man of Faith and took the surgery in stride, receiving much support from family and friends.
“You could feel it,” Pigg said of friends praying for a successful surgery. “My church family is so much support, and my son teaches during the summer and was out of school, so he spent a lot of time with me, and my wife took care of me.”
“One thing that helped me a lot, when they decided I had to have surgery, there was a period there where they couldn’t get to me, so I had a week to think about it and pray about it,” he added. “By the time I had surgery I was ready, I knew it was in God’s hands.”
With surgery day on the horizon and knowing God was in control, there was still a feeling of apprehension a short time before surgery when his doctor explained the surgery details.
“I told my pastor, I’m ready,” said Pigg. “There was one point where I got scared just a little bit, but it only lasted a very short time when the doctor told me what he was going to do. He said he was going to cut me, spread me apart, stop my heart, and put me on a machine. I thought, woah, they’re going to stop my heart and put me on a machine, and of course, they can’t do that without stopping your heart.”
The surgery was successful, and three months later, Vern is back on the court officiating OHSAA high school volleyball.
“Everything was successful,” Pigg noted. “The first two months were tough, but I started getting much better. I won’t give up on basketball yet, but I think I may be done with basketball.”
Pigg credits not smoking and drinking for his long officiating career and successful heart surgery.
“I have never participated in those things that are supposed to be unhealthy,” Pigg said. “My family doesn’t have any heart conditions, so when that happened, my family said, Vern, why would it happen to him? It’s just another test I am going through, and I feel really good about it.”
Vern said he “plans to keep going as long as possible.”
