During my high school days I had perfect attendance for all four years at Troy High School. Sure, there were some difficult times in achieving that honor, but I was the only one in my class of more than 300 to do so.

Just think, roughly 180 days a year times four is 720 days of going to classes. Wow. That’s quite a lot of studying!

How about keeping a high school boys’ basketball scorebook for 49 years?

Tom Rataiczak reached a milestone Friday night when he charted the St. Clairsville versus Bellaire JV-Varsity doubleheader inside the ‘House of Champions’ on Guernsey Street in the All-American Town. It was his 1,900th consecutive game in doing so.

Rataiczak, who also serves as executive director of the Ohio Valley Athletic Conference, was honored prior to the game.

“This is my 49th year,” he said. “I was teaching at Bellaire when I got my start.”

Legendary Claire Cribbs was the head coach when Rataiczak started his career.

“He got sick and Terry Snively took over. Terry asked me to help him out and I thought it would be a cool thing to do,” Rataiczak recalled. “Then I got interested in doing stats. If Terry would have never asked me to help him out, this would have never occurred.

“When Mark Matz came in as head coach he wanted to start a stats program. That’s really when things got intense as far as keeping all of the different statistics, records and stuff like that.”

Never in his right mind did Rataiczak think he would still be doing this nearly half-a-century later.

“Never even gave it a thought until I got up over 1,000,” he admitted. “It was then that I wondered how many games had I done. That’s when I started going back through. I went back to the first game and started counting. I said ‘whoa, you’re over a thousand already.’ Then I started keeping track of them as I went through.”

He became so enamored in his work that he has designed his own scorebooks.

“This is my third one that I have had copyrighted,” he noted. “I designed it because I wanted it for my specific needs. The way I like to do it. I have used NCR sheets where you would tear one off at halftime and give it to the coaches to look at. I’ve had the long books and everything, but I finally came up with this one and I ‘ve been using it for probably 12-15 years now.”

Over his career Rataiczak has seen some of the best basketball players in Ohio Valley history.

“I look back and think about all of the athletes that I’ve seen. I go back to watching Bellaire’s Lee Patrone and (former Bridgeport standout) John Havlicek,” he said. “There were some great players to come through this area. As far as the most complete player, Nate Davis gets the nod. There were a lot of great coaches, too.”

His love for keeping score and statistics has carried over to his daughter, Sherri, who formed a group of girls as the Big Reds’ state crew. His son, Terry, even got into the act.

“My daughter has had this group of girls doing stats for quite some time now, and my son and his friend worked up a computer program for stats before computers became popular,” he said.

Is the an end number he has as a goal?

“I want to try and get to 2,000,” he admitted. “That’s my goal.”

Doing approximately 44 games a year means he would have to stick around couple more years.

Knowing, Tom, he’ll hit 2,000 and keeping on scoring.