No. As Ref Union so eloquently said recently, “You’re offering $30 a game.” And I’m passing.

Frankly, I don’t quite understand the economics of youth sports, other than someone’s getting a lot of money in many venues, and it isn’t the officials.

This isn’t the case everywhere. I am involved with Little League, where officials are volunteers and a key aspect is keeping costs low for families. There are school-run and community-run programs that are similar. What I’m talking about here are tournaments and events run under the travel/club banner, where families frequently have to get hotel rooms in “destination locations” and the kids play in complexes built just to support the travel machine.

Next season high school basketball officials in the area will make about $80 for a varsity game and $60 for a JV game. Throw in a JV2 game at $60 per official and officiating costs are about $500 for an evening.

High school games in Wisconsin are 18-minutes stopped clock halves for varsity and 16-minutes stopped clock halves for lower levels. Most JV games are done in about 80 minutes and a vast majority of varsity games are done within 90 minutes, many in less than 75.

These youth tournaments think they’re being generous when they pay officials $30 for a game that frequently run on the hour. In many cases these tournaments involve high school players (and even if they don’t, why does that matter?) and unlike varsity games, they only hire 2 officials per game.

Many of these tournaments charge big registration fees for teams, they have arrangements with local hotels and *require* teams use them for lodging (a despicable practice known as “stay-to-play” which puts more money into the tournament organizers’ pockets), they charge significant admission for the family members who come to watch (and in almost all cases *transport* the kids to the events), many actually charge parking. There are expensive concession stands and people are forbidden from carrying in food or drinks. So there’s a lot of money coming in.

And when it comes to the officials? They don’t want the best – they want the ones that will work for $30 or even less. Some of these events charge officials parking or expect officials to pay for their rooms from their game fees.

How do I know that these organizers don’t care about quality? Not only will they hire anyone to do these games, they will also assign them as many games as they will take. Show me an official who is fresh in game 6 and, well, you know what I’m saying….

I don’t blame the assigner here. He has an impossible job and is trying to make this work, but the whole mentality around this stuff has got to change.

I stopped working this stuff over a decade ago. I found that I get little from it and that we end up taking shortcuts in our mechanics just to get through the grind. By the third or fourth game, I would rather be anywhere but officiating those games.

I’d happily do 2 games and put in a full effort working proper mechanics. Here’s the thing, though – I’m not blocking off a portion of my day for $60. And nobody should have to work four games to get over $100. Finally, working 2-person does absolutely nothing for me (or many other officials) as not a single game I/we work in the season uses 2-person mechanics.

If a HS game pays $80, why doesn’t a game like this pay $45 or $50? Because some officials will take 9 games and think they did great taking home $270 (even if they walk up and down the floor or can’t walk the next day).

I never really did a lot of basketball like this, although when I was significantly younger I did as many as 9 or 10 in a row a few times (and then couldn’t get out of the car when I arrived home). I did many more “long” days in baseball over the years.

I quit doing baseball not specifically because of the level of pay, but because few of these tournaments actually respect the work officials put in.

I’ll give an example. About 12-15 years ago, I offered to help out a friend who was assigning at the time in the Dells. He was not the “person in charge” on site, which is important to this story. I umpired a game and my partner and I went to the car to change plate/bases for the second game.

When we returned, there was only one team, and they were leaving. Turns out the other team decided to pack it in for the weekend instead of getting hammered again, and they got an early start home.

Sadly we had another game 90 minutes later and I was an hour from home, so I couldn’t go anywhere. However, I wanted to make sure we would get paid for the forfeit I was at the field for. The organizer could not understand why he should pay us for a game we didn’t work. Here are a few reasons:

• We were there, ready to work.
• The teams had already paid for us and were not getting refunds.
• The organizer saw and opportunity to pocket the money we would’ve gotten.
• See #3.

In the end, I told the organizer we were either getting paid for that 90 minutes we had to sit there – or we were leaving and he could figure out how to umpire that third game himself. He paid us. I never went back. Matter of fact, other than one other day like this I did a week before we went on vacation (for some family spending cash) I haven’t done anything like that since.

So officials for these events are simply cost centers. I hope that’s obvious to most. They aren’t really improving their games. And

What’s really awful about this is that in many cases, the organizers want officials to tolerate bad behavior because dropping the hammer is seen as “bad for business.” In other words, if a deserving coach or parents are shown the door, that team might not come back the next tournament – and that’s more important than taking care of and supporting the officials.

I think this stuff *could* be fixed, but first these events have to be taken from those who only use them to make piles of money. A boy can dream, I guess, but I don’t have a lot of faith, at least not in the near term.

The only way this stuff gets fixed is when officials simply stop accepting this stuff for way too little money and way too much bad behavior. The best way would be for officials to organize and negotiate as a group, but the independent contractor status of officials and the willingness of some in the avocation to crawl over other officials to take assignments makes in quite difficult.

Tomorrow we’ll start looking at other factors affecting assigning and the officiating shortage.