I was going to make a detour and talk about youth sports today and why these organizations need to pay their officials a respectable rate, but I’ve spent all morning chasing officials for high school games. The shortage of officials, combined with the weather this spring and subsequent makeup dates has put us in a real bind. I don’t think we’ve cancelled any games yet, but it could be coming, as early as Thursday.

So today, I’m going to detour and talk about high school pay, at least locally, and some thoughts on how to stay on top of this going forward.

There are so many factors at play here that’s it’s tough to figure out how to put a real plan in place to try to improve the situation. In my humble opinion (remember when IMHO was actually a *thing* people wrote?) the only way to fix things that are broken is to look at each variable separately, but unlike the scientific method, we need to apply several fixes at the same time.

I think it’s obvious how we can actually approach multiple variables in a positive way. Our goal isn’t just to slightly improve the situation after all — and using a multi-pronged approach isn’t going to make things worse for us. But today I’ll focus on pay and later on I’ll focus on some other things we can do to make things more appealing for the officials and for those considering starting to officiate.

This morning I had an official negotiate for travel pay for a doubleheader I needed to fill in a few weeks. Personally, I feel it is everyone’s right, as an independent contractor, to negotiate for pay. It’s up to me, as the person hiring the independent contractor, to say YES or NO. This time, I said NO to travel pay and I filled the spots anyway.

An aside: I had a few people reach out to me and try to negotiate pay for already contracted events this year. I am not a fan. I was polite in my responses to those folks, but I have signed many contracts in my time and when I agree to work on a certain date for a certain level of pay, I’m going to do that. If I’m going to negotiate, it’s on future dates.

From my seat, the worst thing that can happen is for me to start paying officials a different amount for each spot on the field, on the court, on the pitch. Officiating shouldn’t be a place where I wonder if my partner(s) are making the same, less, or more than me. I get enough of that when I buy a plane ticket. A much better approach is for me to push to get all fees to a level where I can attract enough quality officials to fill my schedules.

When I moved to Wisconsin in 2002, varsity contests in the sports I worked paid $50 to $55 a game. When I took over assigning the Trailways officials in 2014, officials were paid $60, just $5 more than the conference paid in 2002.

I do not want to bad mouth any of the administrators in the conference. I still work with some of them and they do their level best to get things right year after year. The thing is, officiating has always been seen as an expense, a cost center by quite a few, most of whom have retired now.

I’ve openly wondered how many school administrators would be happy working for a 9% increase in pay over 12 years. I get that there are pieces of this that are not apples to apples, but let’s look at things from another angle.

In 2002, officials earned $55 in the conference I assign currently. Using a US inflation calculator, that $55 in 2002 needs to be $87.90 to have the same purchasing power in 2022. The biggest mistake with officiating pay in this area is that it’s not tied to CPI, like many other positions in the schools are. If officiating pay was tied to CPI, we wouldn’t have to sit down as frequently and debate and discuss how much we should be paying.

Some conferences here pay mileage to officials – they pay a certain amount per mile, usually less than the IRS business mileage deduction amount. I have a few reasons why I think paying mileage is not the best move – we should be looking to invest that mileage money into the flat fees we’re paying officials:

• Schools would much prefer to have officiating be a fixed cost. If every official was paid mileage for every game, that variable cost could lead to dramatic expense differences between schools.
• Ah, but we could cap mileage payments. If we’re capping them, take that capped amount and divide by the number on the crew and pay that money in the game rate.
• Officials ride together frequently and if one mileage fee is paid, then officials have to decide how to divide that up. It’s not always that simple – I’m still owed $20 from a game I worked in 2012 where an official stiffed me when I was a last minute fill-in who drove 60 miles each way to work.
• As an assigner, I don’t want to be told I need to find officials less than X miles away, based on some business manager’s calculation.
• As an official, I want the choice to work 20, 30, 40, 60, or 100 miles away based on my tolerance for travel. Some schools will start hiring more local people based not on ability, but cost.
• As an assigner, I can always, in an emergency, pay more. I have and will continue to for those who drive outside their areas to help out. But in those cases, EVERY OFFICIAL on the game will get the higher amount.

In the conferences I currently assign, we have not quite caught up to inflation in all sports using 2002 as a start date. But since 2014, that $60 fee will become $80 for most sports next year and even more in some of the ones with the most dramatic shortages.

My opinion is that we need to evaluate this annually and we likely need to start incorporating some CPI numbers annually into our game fees going forward as well as maybe a bit more to make up the gaps from so many years of tabling the discussion for another year, which happened frequently in the years from 2002 until 2014.

Other states do incorporate COLA (cost of living adjustments) into their annual pay adjustments and those places enjoy some of the higher officiating rates (and to be fair, cost of living in general) in the country.

Tomorrow I will look back at youth sports and talk about why so many really good officials simply pass on that stuff. It’s not just money, but it’s a significant part of the conversation.