By Garth Shanklin-
Sports Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a two-part series on the dwindling number of referees. Part one can be found in print in our December 2 edition.
The numbers speak for themselves.
Since the start of the 2010-2011 school year, Ohio has lost roughly 1,500 officials statewide. Baseball has lost nearly 800, football is down over 400, and the number of referees in basketball has dropped by nearly 600.
Rob Rude has spent most of his life around officiating. He is the assignor for sports in the Eastern Cincinnati Conference and the Southern Buckeye Conference. He also is in charge of the pre-sport administration program at UC Clermont.
Over the summer, Rude wrote a research paper titled “The Baseball and Softball Umpire Crisis in Cincinnati,” where he took an in-depth look at the lack of officials at a local and nationwide level. He’s not the first. Ohio University published an infographic created by the school’s Online Masters in Athletic Administration program that gives a few reasons for the decline in officials.
For starters, officials usually don’t make large amounts of money. According to the infographic, officials generally make between $35 and $91 per game, depending on sport and location. Rude said that one of the major hurdles in attracting new officials is the cost.
“The start-up cost is one factor,” Rude said. “With baseball, it can cost you $300-$400 to get started. The time it takes to go through the training, you’re looking at 25-30 hours of classroom time and scrimmages.”
Some states, such as Tennessee, require officials to pass background checks. According to Ohio University, the cost for those annual checks is covered by the official. In addition, Rude said the timing of games can also be a problem, especially at the high school level. However, the high school level is not the only level with games that need officiating.
“Youth sports has exploded,” Rude said. “Youth games are cash games, and high schools now use ArbiterPay. You have lower pay, there are tax implications. They can not leave work early, go do a youth game and get cash versus leaving work early, waiting for a check or ArbiterPay and having to pay taxes on it.”
There are more issues than monetary ones. Odds are, if you’ve been to a game regardless of age level, you’ve heard someone disagree with an official’s call. Sometimes, those disagreements are civil. Other times, not so much. Rude said a Cincinnati youth league is taking steps to limit the amount of physical and verbal abuse officials receive during games.
“The big youth basketball leagues in the city are going to try to implement a parent code of conduct,” Rude said. “If the parent does something that’s egregious enough to get removed from the gym, they get suspended for whatever amount of games the league deems necessary from the review process, and the kid gets suspended. They’re hoping that because the kid is tied to the suspension it’ll reduce or eliminate the behavior from some of the parents.”
Parents causing problems is another trend backed up by national data. The National Association of Sporting Officials conducted a survey in 2017. Of the roughly 17,000 officials polled, 39.5 percent said that parents cause the most problems with sportsmanship. Coaches were second at 27 percent, followed by fans at just under 19 percent.
“There was almost a brawl this summer between two sets of parents,” Rude said. “We said if this game continues, the parents are all gone, but the kids can play. We said if the parents don’t leave, we’re done. We had to call the police. One guy went and got a bat out of his car and was threatening people. It’s insane.”
In that same NASO survey, 47 percent of officials said they have felt unsafe or feared for their safety due to behavior by administrators, players, coaches or fans. Nearly 57 percent of all officials surveyed said sportsmanship is getting worse.
With the low pay and high levels of abuse, it’s no wonder why so many officials are leaving the profession all together. Rude said just getting officials isn’t the only challenge, keeping them is another problem.
“An average new official in this area for all the sports over the last 10 years is about two years,” Rude said. “They stay in for about two years and then they go. You’ll get some that’ll stay on, but the majority have flamed out within a year or two.”
Rude said his organizations have tried to recruit officials at all levels, but there is no one surefire way to draw in new officials.
“We’ve tried a bunch of different recruiting tactics,” Rude said. “We’ve tried to recruit high school kids, youth kids in different sports. We’ve gone to local colleges and recruited. When the economy was bad, we were able to get some people that were unemployed, but when the economy picked up a lot of them went back to work and stopped. There hasn’t been anything that has clicked.”
The National Federation of State High School Associations has also held a recruitment campaign. The campaign made registering to be an official easier by directing users to specific information for their state, while also using social media platforms to target student-athletes that were nearing graduation.
The campaign started in April of 2017, and as of October 2017 it had garnered over 1.7 million impressions via social media and email and over 1,200 requests for more information nationwide.
Other types of recruiting has been done at the high school level. Ohio’s Zanesville High School launched an elective course in officiating in 2017. Belleview High School added the course in February of this year. According to The Sandusky Register, fewer than five high schools in the state offer such courses.
Rude has tried to get similar programs started in the Cincinnati area.
“The basketball and football organizations partnered with [Cincinnati Public Schools] last year,” Rude said. “They had a program where current officials could donate uniforms and things to help eliminate some of the startup costs. They came to the school so the kids wouldn’t have to do it outside the school, and they got a decent return.”
Rude said problems arose once spring sports began, citing lack of transportation as an issue.
“Most of those kids don’t have transportation,” Rude said. “The baseball and softball fields aren’t at the school, so they can’t get there. At least with football and basketball, the fields and gym is kind of close.”
Rude has tried expanding the program, but it failed. He also tried to start a class of his own at UC Clermont, but got limited responses.
“I pitched that idea to a lot of the suburban districts, but so far nobody’s taken me up on it,” Rude said. “I tried to offer a baseball and softball umpire training class at UC last spring. I think we sent it out to 11,000 students, and I got six responses. I had two students that completed the course.”
Rude said that anyone interested in becoming an official doesn’t have to start at the high school level.
“[It] is a good way to get started,” Rude said. “You can start off doing second graders. That’s a problem with high school sometimes, you jump in with freshman. If you’ve never officiated or umpired, and you’re jumping in with freshman…the game is slower. You can get your feet wet.”
There are resources available for anyone interested in becoming an official. For starters, Rude himself can be reached at umpireassigner@gmail.com. The OHSAA has an entire online section dedicated to becoming an official at ohsaa.org.
