FORMER FLYERS STAR NOW MAKES CALLS AS REFEREE
It’s March Madness for official who’s looking for invite to Big Dance.
When he was MUNCIE, IND. — a standout guard for the Dayton Flyers in the late 1990s, he was known as “The Blanket” because of the way he covered opposing players.
But Friday night at Ball State — at least to one vociferous, red-capped fan sitting in the front row at Worthen Arena — he was simply “Stripes.”
As in: “Hey, Stripes, are you blind?”
The guy had taken exception to a foul call made just before halftime by Edwin Young, who is now a well-traveled referee.
The call had come after Northern Illinois guard Eugene German had missed an outside shot and the Huskies’ 6-foot-
11 Croatian center, Marin Maric, had outbattled Ball State’s Sean Sellers and tipped the ball in with 5.5 seconds left.
Young had whistled Sellers for a foul and Maric made the free throw as well.
When the half ended, Ball State coach James Whitford approached Young at midcourt and asked for an explanation. While he conceded his guy had fouled, he thought Maric had come over the back to get to the ball.
Although Young’s call looked correct, the redcapped guy wasn’t giving in:
“No way! Impossible! You better get some glasses.”
Well, the guy was wrong. Young doesn’t need an optometrist, he needs a dentist.
Earlier in day — when we talked at a coffee shop in the new Liberty Center shopping complex between Dayton and Cincinnati — he showed the souvenir he had gotten following a loose-ball scrum during a recent Summit League game in Colorado between the University of Denver and Nebraska-Omaha.
“When you have young men and they’re 6-7 or 6-8 and they work out, things can get pretty intense,” he said. “As a referee, you are also the mediator and we had a situation where we had a jump ball but the two guys didn’t stop on the whistle. But if you yell, ‘Stop...Stop...Stop,’ they don’t hear you with 10,000 people screaming. So you keep your whistle in and just ‘beep, beep,
beep’ until they stop.” That’s what Young was doing when Denver’s 6-foot-10, 245-pound Daniel Amigo joined the fray.
“I went to grab him and ‘oooofff.’ His hand got caught in the lanyard of my whistle, which I was biting down on, and my tooth got bent backward,” Young explained.
After assessing a technical and then holding a towel to his bloodied mouth, Young bit down on his whistle and finished the game.
“I’ll have to see a dentist when the season ends,” he shrugged.
But that’ll be a while yet.
After officiating Ball State’s 87-82 victory Friday night, he headed to the Horizon League tournament in Detroit and worked the Oakland-Youngstown State game Saturday evening. Today he has the UICGreen Bay game and Monday he refs a Mid-American Conference tournament opener at Kent State. Then it’s on to Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland for Thursday and Friday games in the MAC tournament.
After that there may well be other postseason assignments.
The Ball State-NIU game was Young’s 68th this season and his fifth (across four states) in seven days.
The marathon had mostly gone smoothly — Kent State on Saturday, Niagara on Sunday, Akron on Tuesday — until he took a flight to St. Louis for Thursday night’s game with La Salle. With a massive storm moving through the Midwest, one flight was canceled. He was then rerouted to Atlanta, but said the pilot had to make a 90-minute detour through turbulent air to get around the storm.
“I fly all the time, but this time I was so sick,” Young admitted. Then came a missed flight in Atlanta and finally he got to St. Louis just a few hours before tipoff.
A late-night flight had finally brought him back to his home in Mason and then, after a short night — “The Blanket” said he had hated to say goodbye to his pillow — he met with me Friday morning.
Although he had some puffiness under his eyes — and, of course, that bent tooth — he also flashed that easy smile that once so endeared him to Dayton fans.
It had come when he thought back to his days growing up in Zanesville, where he said his single-parent mom worked three jobs and he and his brother first played basketball at Cutty Dixon Park.
“I never thought a basketball would provide me all this opportunity,” he said. “God has really blessed me to stay in a game I love.”
He now officiates in six leagues — the Big Ten, Atlantic 10, Mid-American Conference, Horizon League, Summit League and Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference — and this season he also has worked special invitational games at Madison Square Garden in New York and AmericanAirlines Arena in Miami.
Yet as his stature and financial rewards have grown — Big Ten games pay $3,000, the A-10 is $2,500 and Horizon League and MAC are $2,000 (though he said you pay your own expenses in each league) — the 39-year-old Young said he tries to stay grounded by remembering one prime tenet.
“You’ve got to respect the game and as an official you’ve got to always remember it’s not about you. It’s about the student-athlete, the schools, the students, the coaches, and the fans who pay to be entertained. The ultimate compliment for a referee is for someone to say, ‘I watched that game and I didn’t even notice you there.’”
A Flyers standout
Once Young was one of those featured athletes.
Playing for UD coach Oliver Purnell, he started 104 of his 118 games spanning 1996 to 2000 and had some memorable outings. He still holds the UD Arena record, going 18 for 18 from the free-throw line against Northeast Louisiana in December 1997.
His most memorable performance, though, came against visiting Xavier before a sellout crowd his senior season.
With under two minutes left, the Muskies were up by one. UD had the ball and that’s when Young tapped the top of his head, signaling his teammates he’d take it from there.
He drove around Xavier guard Maurice McAfee, went down the lane, maneuvered a shot past 6-foot-7 Aaron Turner and put Dayton ahead. At the end of the play he crumpled to the court with an ankle sprain. Purnell brought him to the bench, but he spurned the trainer’s help and successfully pleaded to get back on the floor.
And that’s when he promptly stole the ball from Xavier guard Darnell Williams, was fouled and made two free throws to seal the 76-72 victory.
After UD he played briefly overseas and then helped coach at Miami University-Middletown, Miamisburg High School and with the Dayton Metro AAU team.
Former Flyer Al Sicard got him hooked up with State Farm Insurance and today Young has his own agency in Cincinnati. He’s divorced and has two daughters, 18-yearold Alexis, who will be a scholarship volleyball player at Ohio Dominican University next year, and 7-year-old Lyla.
It was after Young’s playing days that veteran Cincinnati referee Jackie Sanders convinced him to try officiating. Young paid his dues working his way up the ranks from high school and junior college games and now, along with a full slate of NCAA Division I games, he runs the Cincinnati Officiating Academy that mentors more than 60 referees from the Division II and III levels.
And yet, for all the academy’s seminars and videos, some lessons are best brought home in the oftcramped dressing quarters officials use.
That brings to mind a story veteran referee Randy Drury once told me about the days when Bob Huggins — now the legendary coach at West Virginia — was at Akron:
“They had a routine. Beforehand, a polite kid would come in and ask you what you wanted on your pizza after the game. But afterward, if Akron lost, there was no pizza.”
‘My name’s Edwin’
Friday evening, Young got to Worthen Arena nearly two hours before tipoff. Soon he was joined by his officiating partners for the night: Frank Spencer from Missouri and Rob Kueneman from North Dakota. After talking about their recent travels, each began his pregame routine.
“I get two bags of ice and ice my knees for 30 minutes,” Young said. “I use one of those TimTam massagers to loosen the muscles (in his legs) and I’ll do maybe 40 minutes of stretching with one of those (resistance) bands.”
He said he figures he runs three to four miles — some 8,000 steps — in a game.
While he knew some of the coaches Friday from his Dayton connections — NIU assistant Jon Borovich used to be on Brian Gregory’s staff at UD; he played against Ball State assistant Jason Grunkemeyer, who was at Miami, and Whitford was on Charlie Coles’ Miami coaching staff when Young played — he said he does not trumpet his Flyers days, especially to fans who might question any impartiality.
The only person he said he really chatted up at courtside Friday night was the ballgirl behind the basket who brought him water during breaks:
“I said, ‘My name’s Edwin, what’s yours?’ And she told me ‘Sarah.’ I told her I’d see later if she remembered my name.”
To the officiating trio’s surprise Friday night, the national supervisor of officials, J.D. Collins, was courtside to observe them. Just like the committee that watches and picks the teams, Collins was working on his NCAA Tournament bracket, Young said.
While there are more than 1,000 Division I officials, only 102 or so are picked for the tournament, and then the top 10 who grade out make the Final Four.
Scrutiny of officials is ongoing. Regional supervisors — even if they are at games elsewhere in the country — can watch the calls a crew makes at a particular game through special software.
As for Young and his partners, they had a mostly uneventful game until the final few minutes, when they had to go to the courtside monitor three times, including once when the clock briefly stopped working and once when Maric and an opposing Ball State player got into a verbal tiff that required intervention before it became physical. A pair of technical fouls eventually were assessed, and the game’s final seconds ticked off without incident.
Before he left the court, Young had stopped by the ballgirl one last time. His early chats had been meant to keep her fully engaged in the game and now he was going to reward her efforts.
“I always try to have interaction with kids so they have a good time,” he said. “I thanked her for the water and I said, ‘If you still remember my name. I’ll give you the dollar I carry in my pocket.’” The girl didn’t hesitate. No Blanket, no Stripes for her.
“I know you,” she beamed. “You’re Edwin!”
Young gave her the dollar bill and a bent-tooth smile.