Referee shortage has been ‘a nightmare’
Toxic environment, COVID are main issues
The 13-year-old soccer players in Cincinnati had been pulling at their opponents’ jerseys all game. Rhiana Garcia raised her flag again and again, signaling fouls. But a coach took issue with her officiating that October night in 2020.
The insults he directed at Rhiana, who was 14 at the time, intensified throughout the match; she said he had accused her of being color-blind and had shouted expletives and a racial slur at her. Before the final whistle blew, the coach had been kicked off the field. And Rhiana, holding back tears, texted her boss, “I don’t know if I can do this anymore.”
Such unruly behavior is the driving force, referees say, behind a nationwide shortage of youth sports officials.
The shortfall has persisted for years, as rowdy parents, coaches and players have created a toxic environment that has driven referees away and hampered the recruitment of new ones, referees say. The pandemic only made things worse: The cancellation of games and entire seasons over the past two years hastened an exodus of older officials who decided that they didn’t want the low pay, angry shouting — or potential infection.
Now as youth games return, many referees are deciding that they will not. From 2018 to 2021, an estimated 50,000 high school referees — roughly 20% — quit, said Dana Pappas, director of officiating services for the National Federation of State High School Sports.
New Hampshire lost one-quarter of its hockey referees between 2018 and 2022, while the Public School Athletic League in New York City said it was short about 90 officials in Brooklyn.
“This is a nightmare across all sports,” Pappas said.
Across Massachusetts, hundreds of hockey games have been canceled this spring because no one was available to officiate them, said Eugene Binda, who manages and assigns youth referees in the state.
In Indiana, parents were asked to fill in and officiate soccer games. And in New York City, postseason basketball tournaments were suspended because of the shortage, said Angela Halasy, who manages girls basketball referees for the city’s Public School Athletic League.
Rare instances of referees getting punched during games by parents, coaches or players have drawn attention to the issue. This year, referees have reported being followed to their cars, attacked by players on the field and struck by objects thrown by spectators, Pappas said. Binda, who assigns referees in Weymouth, Mass., said one of his officials was punched by a player and knocked to the ice during a hockey game in February. Just this month, a basketball referee in DeKalb County, Georgia, was chased, kicked and punched by several players, WSB-TV in Atlanta reported.
“It’s driving a lot of people out of the business,” Binda said. “We are really in a dire, bad, bad situation in terms of retention.”
Officially Human, an organization that promotes the respectful treatment of referees, conducted a survey of nearly 19,000 officials in 2019. Asked what their top reason for quitting would be, 60% said verbal abuse from parents and fans. According to a 2017 survey of more than 17,000 referees by the National Association of Sports Officials, 39% said that parents caused the most problems with sportsmanship. (Coaches were second at 29%.)
“They feel as though they have the right to berate these young officials,” said Chris Rousseau, the supervisor of officials for the New
Hampshire Amateur Hockey Association. “In some cases, I’ve watched them make these kids cry.”
The problem is that as parents spend more time and money on children’s sports, families are “coming to these sporting events with professional-level expectations,” said Jerry Reynolds, a professor of social work at Ball State University who studies the dynamics of youth sports and parent behavior. A 2019 Harris Poll found that 1 in 4 parents reported spending about $500 a month on youth sports.
That level of expectation has had an impact on retention, Reynolds said, describing it as a vicious cycle: A new, younger referee gets yelled at for not getting every call right. That referee quits. A new referee comes in, gets yelled at and quits.
Some who haven’t quit, like Tyrek Greene of Dayton, Ohio, are being more selective about the assignments they take. Greene, 21, recalled working as the referee at a soccer game for 9-year-olds when a mother
became upset that he was not calling fouls against her son. He said she got up from the bleachers, walked onto the field and screamed in his face before turning to her son and telling him, “You kick other players too, then!”
“I refuse to do little-kid games just because parents are absurd and they take the game way too extremely,” said Greene, who has been a referee for five years.
In Cincinnati, Rhiana, now 16, is still refereeing this year. She said she has gotten used to the hustle of the job and is getting better about tuning out the abuse, even if she still sometimes finds herself “caught up in my own thoughts because I think that everyone is praying for my downfall.”
A friend quit refereeing after a season, she said, and her cousins also moved on. But Rhiana said she would keep at it, at least for another season or two.
Still, she warned, “there’s only so much a person can take.”