Inside the secret, unforgiving lifestyle of high school basketball officials

Taryn O’Neil’s first test of resolve as a basketball official came in her third week on the job.

Six years ago, she refereed a Metro West recreational league game for 12-year-old boys. O’Neil didn’t have much confidence yet and she was afraid it showed. As the game progressed, every call she made seemed to infuriate one side of the stands. Then, it reached a boiling point.

“I started crying — like, on the court — and this mom pulls out her phone and starts videotaping me, and I’m just in tears,” O’Neil said. “And I told my partner, ‘You can have my game fee. I don’t want to finish this game.’ ”

O’Neil was moved to another game on a different court, finished her day, and didn’t let the jarring experience faze her. She’s since earned assignments for three MIAA state championships.

At 34, O’Neil says she’s one of the youngest officials she knows. She cites a 2017 statistic from the National Association of Sports Officials that 70 percent of officials drop out after their first three years in the field.

The nationwide shortage seems to have abated, with the NFHS reporting an eight percent uptick in total officials this year. But basketball and New England are still faced with a shortage and age crisis. The NASO surveyed 784 basketball officials from the region as part of their 2023 nationwide data collection; 82.9 percent were at least 50 years old. The average age of a high school sports official was 56.

“It can be really intimidating when you go out onto a court and you blow your whistle and you’re kind of under this microscope,” O’Neil said. “A lot of people do not realize that it takes time. They just see you as an official. It can be really brutal, some of the feedback that you get from coaches or parents.”

Officials are the most heavily scrutinized members of a basketball game. They’re the subject of light boos at best and, at worst, physical assaults and threats. Extreme tales go viral regularly; a woman was accused of assaulting two hockey officials in Foxboro, Mass., in January, and a Rhode Island basketball coach faced charges this summer after video circulated of him appearing to wield a knife at a referee.

Rarely do officials themselves speak about the true nature of their jobs. So we went to find them.

Mary Bradbury is in her 26th year as an official. She’s the secretary of Board 152 of the International Association of Approved Basketball Officials (IAABO) and helps oversee the Cape Cod region. She graduated from SUNY Cortland in 1979 with a passion for officiating after taking an elective course in college. After she married and raised a family, Bradbury returned to the profession, and today refs approximately 90 games per year among high school, AAU and rec leagues.

When Bradbury has a varsity game, she tries to show up for at least a half of the preceding JV game to check details: where the clock and shot clock are, what features exist on the scoreboard, and how diligent the scorer’s table is.

Bradbury says she’s been followed to the locker room and verbally berated while getting into her car. One fan threatened to throw a water bottle at her.

“I work hard at it,” Bradbury said. “I still haven’t called a perfect game. I know I make mistakes, but I also have rapport and relationships. Whether I’m meeting them for the first time or I’ve seen them for the last 10 years, 15 years, you walk in the gym and you establish that rapport so that you can talk nicely to each other. … I know I am pure of spirit and intent. I’m not the best, I’m not all that, and I’m not trying to say I am. But at this point, I’m experienced enough and seasoned enough, and I do try to build relationships, and I definitely always try to be honest and fair.”

Kyle Scofield may be on the younger end of the officiating spectrum at 41, but he has more than 20 years of experience. Scofield is the apprentice chair of the New Hampshire Football Officials Association and a regular presence on the high school gridiron. On the hardwood, he’s worked his way up the levels and now refs women’s college basketball.

Scofield recalls and was motivated by watching his father ref local basketball and football games. (Both are still active officials.) But Scofield has also accumulated his share of shocking incidents.

One time in Arizona, he was participating in a Division 1 college officiating tryout where officials practiced by refereeing local youth games. Scofield officiated an 8-to-10-year-old girls game where a parent lost control and stormed the court, prompting ejection from the facility.

“And he goes, ‘That’s great. I’m gonna leave the gym, I have a gun in my Jeep, I’m gonna get it and come back in here,’” Scofield said. “So at that point we’re like, ‘All right, now we need the police, the sheriff, or whoever was there, and now you’re definitely not coming back in the gym, and you can enjoy whatever they’re gonna have you experience today.’”

Scofield, Bradbury and O’Neil are in different stages of their careers, but they share similar views on parts of their job.

To start: They emphatically agree AAU and youth games are far more challenging than high school. The pay significantly drops — the low end of the AAU scale can be $30-40, while high school varsity games sit around $105 — and there’s often no site administrator in charge of protecting the officials or removing unruly fans.

Fan behavior can be worse, however. O’Neil remembers leaving an AAU boys tournament to find two parents fighting each other in the parking lot. That animosity can extend to referees.

“I’ve had the privilege of working with some amazing officials … and they’re like, ‘I don’t do AAU anymore,’” O’Neil said. “(They say), ‘I just can’t deal with that — can’t deal with the yelling, can’t deal with the brawls, I can’t deal with any of that. Not worth it.’”

Because so many AAU teams now exist at various levels and age groups, these officials feel coaching also is less regulated, with less accountability versus a high school coach.

“If (a high school coach) gets thrown out or there’s an issue, there’s consequences. There’s the school, there’s the principal, there’s the superintendent, there’s the school board, there’s all these things,” Scofield said. “But an AAU coach or youth coach in a rec youth program gets thrown out, and they’re just back next week on the sideline unless that organization chooses to deal with it — and a lot of them don’t.”

The mass exodus of about 50,000 officials nationwide during the pandemic contrasts with the explosion of youth basketball and tournaments as an enterprise. To Bradbury and O’Neil, it means new refs are pushed up to higher-stakes games faster.

“I had the luxury of a 1-on-1 mentor. I had the luxury of a year doing youth and JV to cut my teeth, so to speak. That’s not the case now,” Bradbury said. “They’re coming in and, ‘OK, you’re fit, you look like you know what you’re doing, here you go. Here’s a varsity game.’ And they’re in over their heads with being able to make those judgments and handle the coach and manage the players.

“So I think it’s a double-edged sword — yes, we need more people, but they’re getting thrown in too fast, and then they get eaten alive.”

All three officials believe there’s a generational disconnect between the older referees in leadership positions and the demographic they’re hoping to recruit. O’Neil says she rarely sees job postings on platforms like LinkedIn or Indeed where Gen Z would be likely to find it.

She wonders if young adults simply see the scarier parts of officiating and are naturally hesitant, or that the schedule of evening games might conflict with full-time jobs.

Scofield has helped launch a nonprofit to ease financial barriers that could keep young recruits out of the field. Nextgen Refs helps pay for equipment and camps, and it also works to connect new refs in their region with local assignors and partners.

“Our goal is to get more young people involved in officiating, because we all got involved at a really young age and have appreciated what it’s done for our lives, and want to help other people experience that,” he said.

All three officials emphasized how tight-knit the referee community is. Few people understand the experience of having hundreds of spectators criticize them for hours on end, hundreds or thousands of times over. Even across generations, O’Neil considers some officials among her best friends.

They’re also conscious members of the local basketball communities. Officials tout their favorite games and recall the star players they refereed. They have opinions about the youth basketball ecosystem just like everyone else.

And if they know they missed a big call, they’ll lose sleep over it.

“The greatest misconception fans have is that I rolled out of bed today and said, ‘You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna screw the red team today,’” Scofield said. “I think a lot of fans truly believe we’re just out to get them and in reality, I don’t care who wins or loses. I just want to go out there and do the best job I can, because I’m being evaluated. I’m trying to improve.”

Refereeing is not a full-time job below the high Division 1 college level. O’Neil, for example, is a therapist, and Scofield works in food services. Officials certainly aren’t in it for the money. Their motivations are much more complex.

For Bradbury, she feels rewarded in what the game and the profession have given her as she’s grown into a confident leader. For Scofield, he gets to live out his childhood dream and maintain an important father-son connection.

O’Neil also officiates for her father, who died by suicide when she was in high school. The two had bonded over basketball, and when injuries kept O’Neil from a collegiate playing career, she wanted another way to stay close to the sport and to him.

“This sport means a lot to me. It’s a way to kind of keep him alive,” she said. “He was so involved growing up with it, that it felt really nice having that connection to the sport so deeply.

“I think really giving back — because it was a sport that had helped me so much, kind of get through that really difficult time — I wanted to give back in any way that I could, and I thought officiating could be a really, really great option. And it has been.”