South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
From Pompano Beach to the NFL
Two referees add to league’s diversity
Grantis Bell and Sebrina Brunson took different roads from their Pompano Beach roots to the swaggering National Football League.
Both just completed their rookie seasons as NFL officials and are serving as examples of African Americans excelling in non-traditional sports roles.
“It was a lovely journey,” Bell said. “It was something I cherished every single moment along the way, and each step had its own purpose for me being there.”
As part of Black History Month, the South Florida Sun Sentinel is telling stories of the successes and struggles of the Black experience in different parts of our society.
Bell, a 54-year-old who attended Northeast High School, was part of an on-field officiating crew for 15 NFL games this season.
Brunson, also 54, who attended Blanche Ely High
School, interned as an NFL replay assistant for Atlanta Falcons home games.
The two decades of hard work that led them to the NFL provided both with invaluable lessons.
“As far as being a female official in this sport, and being of color, it has forced me to work harder,” Brunson said. “And I don’t mean just harder. Harder. Harder. Harder. Three times as hard, maybe four times as hard, on and off the field.”
Anecdotally, the NFL is making progress diversifying its officiating ranks — the league says 40 of its 121 on-field officials are Black. Five of them were part of the seven-member crew for the 2020 Super Bowl at Hard Rock Stadium.
Black referees are crew chiefs for four of the league’s 17 officiating crews.
And a seven-man, all-black crew worked the Nov. 23 Tampa Bay-Los Angeles Rams game, a first in NFL history.
Bell thinks there’s a deep pool of qualified Black NFL-ready referees. They just need an opportunity.
To further deepen that pool, Brunson and Bell have the same advice for young officials hoping to make it to the next level, whether that’s high school, college or the pros.
“You need to find a mentor,” said Brunson said.
“I think mentoring is huge,” Bell said. “There is no way I would be where I am today if it wasn’t for (NFL veteran official) Roy Ellison.”
Bell credits Black referees such as Ellison and Boris Cheek, a Super Bowl veteran, for giving him advice on how to progress down the path the NFL dreams.
“I think being a Black official,” Bell said, “we always come across as saying to ourselves, ‘We can’t do the same things that other officials do. We can’t walk in the room the same way other officials walk in. We can’t dress the same way as other officials dress.’
“We have to come in looking and being professional at all times because at any given moment this opportunity will be stripped away.”
Brunson and Bell first met while participating in high school track meets. And they have other things in common: Both are college graduates, and both still work incredibly long hours to perfect their craft.
One of Brunson’s weekly Zoom calls — which features analysis and discussion of 10 rules questions — goes from 7 to 11 p.m. Another call goes from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. But that call also features what they call “happy hour,” a sort of after-hours informal chat.
Brunson said younger referees would be surprised how much after-hours work is required for the job.
Bell speaks of “dead-ball officiating,” which basically equates to doing lots and lots of homework off the field.
The hard work is a line of delineation, of sorts.
“It’s how much commitment do guys want to put in,” Bell said, “and that’s where you start separating people.”
Because officiating isn’t a full-time job for most, even at the NFL level, referees have off-season jobs.
Bell, who graduated from West Virginia, is a counselor at Pompano Beach High School.
Brunson, who graduated from Florida Atlantic University, lives in Fulton County, Georgia, and works as a senior case specialist with BI Inc., which provides correctional services to government agencies.
But they still carved out time to do the hard work necessary to make it to the NFL. Bell made his NFL debut on the same crew as his mentor, Ellison, an umpire. They stayed on the same crew all season.
“It gave me a sense of confidence to walk on that field and say, ‘I belong here and I can do this,’ “Bell said.
Perhaps someday Brunson and Bell will provide that feeling of confidence to another rookie Black official.