It all started 20 years ago with Stan Blundell, the Kingfisher baseball coach, he had a fundraising idea that would soon turn into a yearly tradition for a group of locals.
In the beginning years, Jack Snyder would have been the man to thank for your slab of juicy ribs but for the last 13 years, it’s been brothers Ron and Jeff Townsend, Quinton Cline, along with their families and a few friends that show up to help.
Jeff was happy to take on the responsibility of smoking the meat for the baseball fundraiser, as his son Dason, a Yellowjacket graduate of 2017, played baseball at the time. Ron says “I am doing this because it’s my brother, and I wanted to help support my nephew” Quinton’s reasoning for helping all these years is “for the love of the game!”
Little did these guys know that the first year of volunteering would be a record number, with roughly 774 ribs, 700 country-style ribs, and 25 briskets. They worked tirelessly all weekend. Since then, they scaled the meat selection to ribs only.
This year the baseball team collected a grand total of 525 slabs of ribs!
They start Friday evening with preparing the 4 smokers, and seasoning the ribs, Ron says “for whatever reason they took the pepper away from me and I’m no longer allowed to pepper, and it’s my recipe!” Then it’s an early rise on Saturday morning to start the smokin’. As the ribs come off the smoker the baseball boys will pick up their orders and start making the deliveries.
This group of friends and family have made the fundraiser event a time to have fun, and make memories to share at the next one.
In case you missed out this year, the baseball rib fundraiser is always in February. All About Kingfisher will post when you can preorder your rack of fall-off-the-bone smoked ribs.
A special thank you goes to Butch Kottwitz for opening up his place to use and to every volunteer that have donated their time to help make this possible.
The Kingfisher baseball teams would also like to express their gratitude for all the donations, rib orders, and the volunteers that have made this fundraiser a reality.
