This is where I’m going to start. This topic is simple, yet complicated, so I feel that we need to set a level playing field for future discussion. I’ve been kicking around a Top 5 list of why officials are getting out…or maybe even not starting. I’ll share that list with you here and in future entries dive into each one of these topics individually.

• Inadequate pay
• Behavior of spectators (verbal and physical)
• Lack of support by administration
• Inadequate opportunities for advancement / rewards
• Behavior of coaches/players/administration (verbal and physical)

It’s difficult to put these items in any kind of an order, because the reasons for people leaving the avocation are personal. But I’m looking at it from the perspective of “how can we recruit officials?” and “how can we retain the ones we already have?”

In my opinion as a high school assigner, the pandemic didn’t cause the problem we have now. We were always moving in this direction – the pandemic gave officials the opportunity to “do other things” and once games came back, a lot of officials close to retirement (and some who were not) decided it was a good time to call it a career.

It’s simply lazy to blame the pandemic. The average age of officials (at 52 years of age, I am still younger than the average for many sports) was rising before the pandemic as young people simply didn’t feel it was worth it to get into officiating.

I started officiating high school sports as a college freshman. My dorm RA was heading out wearing a basketball referee shirt and I asked him where he was going. He invited me to a local association meeting in the fall of 1987 and I’m still working basketball today, along with football, baseball, and softball.

Why did I start? I umpired some when I was 14-years-old. I was too old to keep playing Little League, my own games were only 1-2 days a week, and I enjoyed hanging around the park. They had two umpires who also managed the youth program and one broke a leg and couldn’t umpire. So I did, for $5 a game, which was a ton of money in 1983 for a 14-year-old.

And in college, I wasn’t going to play sports, so if I wanted to stay around it, I was going to officiate. In 1987, a freshman or JV game in that area of Pennsylvania paid $25. In 2022, a freshman game in some places in Wisconsin still pays only $40 or $45.

So, I’m going to start with pay and why I feel it’s something nobody really wants to talk about, but why I think it deserves to be #1 on this list.

The other things are important, but frankly, I think our perceptions are skewed a bit by the nature of social media and how quickly things go viral. Do I think assault of officials is an incredibly important topic and a direct cause of our shortages? Yes. Just not the primary one. We’ll come back to that, but the next post will be about how schools, conferences, state associations, tournaments, youth programs, and others compensate officials.