Flippin' out for Blue Lou

LAKE LILLIAN — Fans at a sporting event don’t pay to see the officials at work.

That is, unless “Blue Lou” is behind the plate calling balls and strikes with his own brand of showmanship, flair and acrobatics.

A manufacturing engineer by day, Louis Williams IV moonlights as a youth softball umpire during the summers. He also officiates basketball, football and volleyball.

“I’m trying to get my hands into all sports and just impact it, you know?” Williams said. “My whole philosophy is whoever I come across, I just want to have an impact and an everlasting memory. I also want to just remind kids that it’s a sport. Sometimes we get so caught up in the competitiveness of it that we forget to have fun.”

For Blue Lou, that means calling a strike, and immediately following up with chants that are mirrored by both dugouts and the crowd. Between innings, there’s a bevy of backflips as fans young and old marvel at the former St. Cloud State football player’s athleticism.

“They see the umpire having fun, they maybe loosen everybody up and they have fun as well,” Williams said.

The antics of Blue Lou are catching on. His TikTok account ( @steveyyjayylou ) has over 22,600 followers and over 650,000 likes.

When BOLD needed an umpire for its 14U softball game against Willmar/New London-Spicer Monday in Lake Lillian, Tami Flann took a shot in the dark and reached out to Williams. Tami’s husband, Jared, is a coach on the BOLD 14U softball team and their daughter Ema plays on the squad.

“At our state tournament games, he umped all three of our games. That Monday, I was sitting around with my daughter and I’m like, ‘We need an ump. I’m going to message Blue Lou and see if he’ll ump,’' Tami said. “He responded back immediately and he’s like ‘Absolutely. Just tell me where Lake Lillian is.’

“The kids were excited because the girls all know who Blue is from TikTok.”

The beginnings of Blue Lou started with a dare.

When calling pitches behind the plate during a game, Williams got challenged.

“A kid tested me one day,” Williams said. “I was just doing the basics and calling a regular strike and he said, ‘Blue, you need to get something funnier than that,’ and I was like OK. So later that day, I was going home thinking what if I do bowling or some bow and arrows, you know? I was thinking of all these creative things.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Williams had time to tinker with ideas and refine his act.

When he finally went with the bow-and-arrow strike call, parents chuckled.

“They were joining in with me at one point,” Williams said.

He took a greater risk by adding backflips to his repertoire. It had been 10 years since Williams did a backflip. Thankfully, he stuck the landing.

“I did a backflip and boom, the crowd went crazy,” he said. “I did like five or six hundred backflips that day.”

Williams had cheers stuck in his head after working at softball tournaments. So, that got added to the cauldron of ideas.

When a batter gets hit by a pitch: “Way to take one for the team, even if you wanna scream.” Or when a player draws a walk: “She’s a walker, just like Betty Crocker.”

With Williams behind the plate for the tournament, Tami saw the BOLD bench feed off the energy. BOLD went 5-0 and won the Minnesota Tier 5 state championship.

“They were responding to him like crazy and cheering,” Tami said. “There was one time when we were down in our first game by a good four or five runs. We were dead. And they changed their energy with Blue’s energy and we turned the whole day around.”

On Monday, Blue Lou let out his inner superhero in Lake Lillian.

Sporting a Spider-Man costume, Williams called the game between BOLD and Willmar/NLS, which ended with a 8-7 BOLD win. A couple of times, Williams went full wall-crawler and climbed the backstop fence with his phone in hand to document his ascent.

At one point, Williams remembered he wasn’t an Avenger and had to put on his umpire mask so he wouldn’t take a foul ball to the face.

“I guess I was too caught up in the moment,” Williams said after a laugh. “Never do that.”

With Blue Lou in attendance, BOLD made the exhibition game an event featuring meals and a raffle. This was no ordinary raffle; numbered balls were dropped by a plane flying over the field before the fifth inning. Proceeds from the game will be used to improve the field at Lake Lillian.

“We have such good community support from everybody here,” Tami said.

As self-assured as he is in Blue Lou, Williams faced an uncertain future in college.

For budgetary reasons, St. Cloud State cut its football team on Dec. 10, 2019. A defensive back, Williams had just completed his junior season, making 11 appearances and one start.

“I kept fighting with myself because I wanted to keep playing football,” Williams said. “I was going to transfer but I was so caught up in my major that wherever I would have transferred, I was going to pretty much have to restart.”

Williams stayed at St. Cloud State and got his degree in manufacturing engineering and technology. Originally from Milwaukee, Williams now resides in Brooklyn Park.

“I was so deep into it and it’s something that I loved to do,” Williams continued. “So I was like, you know, I’m just gonna stay (at St. Cloud State). Plus, I was on scholarship and they honored it.”

Williams was motivated by a book, “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy. The lesson he got from the book: “We all got talent in this world and it’s up to us to put it on display and show it off.”

He added, “The power of the cell phone, the power of technology (and) the power of the internet, we should take advantage of it.”

As Blue Lou, Williams’ talents are getting noticed. He’ll be umping games in Kansas and Missouri this month. In September and October, he’ll be at eight tournaments in Texas.

Reflecting back on the state tournament, Williams’ impact on that day sticks with Tami. For Blue Lou, and all his antics, it’s all in the name of fun.

“When the girls won that state championship game, they were just standing there,” Tami said. “My husband and I said to each other on the way home, we’re like ‘They don’t act like they just won a state championship tournament.’ and I said, ‘I think it’s because they had fun all day. It felt like a win all day long for them.’”

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Flippin' out for Blue Lou