There are a few constants when attending sporting events at any age level: One team wins and the other loses. Passionate fans. Smells from the concession stands. Team spirit.
But most of all — complaints about the officials. The same officials who are the only reason high school sports exist to begin with. Without officials dedicating their time, money and patience, high school sports would cease to be.
In the storied history of the Georgia High School Association, there have been many changes and additions for the betterment of its competitors. One of the mainstays has been officials who oversee the games and try to keep team personnel and fans in check.
At most sporting events, when something goes wrong for fans’ favorite teams, they look for people to blame.
And in most cases, the fingers point to the officials.
At any sporting event — from little league to professional level — the refs are always hearing it from different angles. It’s a combination of factors that creates a stressful environment for those calling the game, but officials don’t back down from the challenge.
They embrace it.
They have to.
Many forget that officials are people, just like everyone else. And while everybody has opinions about them, officials have their own opinions, as well.
In this “Undercover” series, we are giving sports figures involved with Georgia high school sports an unfiltered platform, through the “anonymous source” label, to air their concerns.
Here are an official’s unfiltered thoughts on the current state of high school sports:
Q: How many years have you been officiating high school sports and how long in Georgia?
A: Thirty-four years, my whole career.
Q: How did you get involved with officiating?
A: My parents.
Q: What sports have you officiated?
A: Football, flag football, volleyball, baseball and softball.
Q: Which sport would you say people complain the most about while you are officiating?
A: Football and baseball. They complain about the close calls we make and the no calls that aren’t made.
Q: From your perspective, who would you say complains more, the fans or the team personnel such as the coaches and the players? How often do you hear someone talking to you?
A: Oh definitely the fans. We hear them all the time.
Q: In your experience what is the craziest thing someone has said to you while officiating?
A: Well, stupid crap like ‘you need to learn the rules,’ you know or ‘you don’t know what you’re doing,’ or ‘you look like a big clown, all you need is a damn red nose,’ mostly stuff like that. That one was down there in Ware County.
Q: Over the years, what would you say is the biggest change that you have seen in high school sports?
A: Well, I think honestly the fans are more vocal, they are more direct with what they say to you. They say things without a conscience. I would say that the state association I am speaking of over the last three or four years has put forth a lot more effort to try to make life easier for us by implementing rules and requirements to have more stadium and gym security and personnel around and resource officers to try to combat this. Over the last three to four years, I have seen a tremendous change in that. Before then it was basically off the chain, you would have people want to come on the field and want to attack you, you know. I was reffing at a Christian school and a parent jumped the fence at a football game and came towards the field and was coming at me— and that was a Christian school. The Sheriff came onto the field and apprehended them and gave him free lodging for the night.
Q: From your perspective, what would you say is the biggest issue going on in high school sports? How can they be resolved?
A: Stacking talent. You have large programs and they have fluent supporters and personnel, they can offer a kid something more. You get one of these big schools in Atlanta, they have more resources and former professional players whose kids are involved with the school so they get that additional training that small schools like Savannah or Atkinson County would not have. You get more media exposure as well, and these are the things that kids migrate to, especially if a kid thinks he has an opportunity to go somewhere. They migrate to these schools to get that exposure. With the NIL coming to play, it is extremely serious now.
Q: How do you think NIL has affected high school sports?
A: You are not going to have that parity anymore. You have the have and the have-nots. I wish they would put a cap on it as to what you can give for each individual student athlete, that would probably help a lot. Some of these kids now, they make more money in college ball, especially the women, they’ll make more money.
Q: Besides quality of play, what would you say is the most notable difference between high school sports and the next level?
A: The good athletes are training harder and seem to be a lot more committed in advance. If they have an opportunity to move to the next level, you can tell the difference in them, they already have a name. When we go to a stadium, we already know who the big dogs are because they have the media exposure like I said, they have the YouTubes and TikToks already in place and you see a lot more college scouts around for these kids than what we used to see. It used to be a big thing, if you go to a ball game and Nick Saban or someone like that is on the sideline then people would wonder who they were here to look at. Now, it’s nothing new to go to a ball game and see a couple of scouts on the sideline and they are looking at two-to-three different kids nowadays.
Q: What point in the game do you hear the most complaining about?
A: Well that depends, we as officials always try not to have an impact on the outcome of a contest. But sometimes, that’s not how it’s perceived in the stands, if it’s against your team in a 7-7 ball game with three minutes left to go and it’s a 15-yard penalty against your team then of course they think it’s **** and that we are cheating you know. You know the coaches on the other sidelines will find all kinds of things to say about you. If the game is 40-0, you hardly have to do anything, just want to get it over with and get out of there. Same thing with baseball and in rec ball, God knows, especially in travel baseball where these parents invest a lot of money in these kids to play. Now, they are belligerent, that is where you really run into your crap. I did some travel games this past weekend and had to eject a parent for repeatedly questioning a call against their child. I was behind the plate and a breaking ball comes in on strike three and I called the kid out and the dad screamed an expletive and said ‘you need to learn how to umpire.’ He asked me if I have ever seen a breaking ball in my life and I said back to him ‘evidently you haven’t.’ He just would not leave me alone. I asked him again to leave me alone and just continue playing baseball, and he wouldn’t stop so he had to go. At that level, a lot of people are not real with themselves, and everyone thinks that their child is a superstar. And because they paid $2,500 for their kids to play, they think he’s got to be good because he’s on the team. If you think about it the only reason your kid is on the team is because you paid $2,500, not because your child can play. There are kids without $2,500 who I know would run circles around your kid. What they don’t realize is that they are taking their kid away from the talent, he’s playing against other teams but that’s a whole different league in itself. It’s a different animal altogether.
Q: What is the most unique challenge you have had to face while officiating?
A: Weather is one, it’s always hard to do a football game in the torrential downpour. Thank God more schools are switching to turf, because before then it was hard to do a ball game because it was hard to stay on your feet a lot of the time. Now, the offense is a lot more complex and we have to stay in the study room more. People don’t realize that if I have a football game on Friday night, I will put in 5-6 hours of film work on these two teams before I get to the game. We do crew film sessions and we do it just like the teams do. They sit down and they prepare for their opponent and we sit down and we prepare for both teams. My crew that I work on, we do a couple hours of film in person and on zoom a week before our game on Friday. We study the teams, learn their tendencies, we know who the athletes are.
Q: As an official, what is the easiest way to communicate to players and coaches while the game is going on?
A: First of all, we can’t react and we can’t react to their reaction. You have to stay composed regardless, you have to understand that they are acting out of anxiety or anger at that moment. Most times it’s confusion because they don’t understand. A bunch of coaches don’t know the rules. It happens every game. Every game you have to talk to some coach that doesn’t know what he is talking about. He’s going to be the one screaming and hollering because he saw something on Sunday that somebody did, well on Friday that is illegal. They can’t distinguish between the two and they are coaching on what they see on Sunday. Georgia high schools require them to do an online clinic and go to a little study session which might last a couple hours and they are good to go. You have to think about when you coach and you are an offensive line coach, you are teaching the kid how to hold and get away with it. They are coaching one way and we are officiating in a different way. We have had coaches that become officials and they will admit that they didn’t know certain rules while they were coaching. I would say ‘Dude you coached for over 20 years’ and they never had rules study sessions. Our association, we meet every week and we do rules study sessions, film study sessions and as the season progresses and we see somebody misses a call at a past game, we will discuss this in our weekly meeting and put it up on the video board so everyone can learn from it so we don’t make those same mistakes.
Q: What is a change in high school sports that you think would benefit it as a whole?
A: Well in football, I would say one of the biggest things is the time that we are required as officials to be at the stadium before the game starts. We are required to be there two hours before kickoff. If we are there two hours before kickoff and we do a ball game which is two to three hours and then we have a postgame which is 30-45 minutes. That’s all combined close to six hours not even factoring in travel time to the location. You can tie up eight hours to go do a ball game and get paid $120. The two hours is the time that we arrive at the stadium, notify the host team that the officials are here, it is designed to have a pregame. In my case, a lot of times we are just there because we have already done our pregame earlier in the week, but we are required to be there because we don’t go to a stadium dressed or leave a stadium dressed, we go and leave in street attire. You don’t know what fool will be waiting on you because you just so happen to throw a flag or you threw a kid out. Some schools are nice enough to where they will provide snacks and refreshments, some don’t give you crap, we’ve been to some schools where there wasn’t even water out in the summertime. Sometimes if you ask for water they will ask you for $2. Other schools will sometimes have a nice spread for you. Georgia high schools, from my years of being involved, have gotten a lot better organized. They do relate to us, and I do credit them for being behind the officials more than they used too. They will stand behind us and they will support us. If you’re wrong you’re wrong but if it’s anything marginal they will stand behind you, and I do appreciate that. Overall, parents need to understand that there is a shortage of officials and this is not statewide, this is nationwide. These are people that like to come to the ballpark and they think they need to come tell us what we need to do, they need to understand that we take applications everyday, and a lot of these people doing it are people that somebody had to go recruit because there is such a shortage and you are not going to get rich doing it, that’s for sure. We do good to break even once you invest your gas money, your wear and tear on your vehicles, uniforms and equipment, a lot of times we do good to break even. The most important part is, no contest can be played without us. I wish that they would take that into consideration when they come because we are human beings. We are parents, fathers, husbands, just like they might be and for the women, mothers too because we do have women officials. This is not a requirement for us, this is an option.
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