- Slug: Sports-Officiating Shortage, 1,389 words
- 2 photos available
By David Rodish
Cronkite News
TEMPE — “More is possible” were the words printed on Victoria Jackson’s shirt as she welcomed guests to the recent Title IX and Global Football event. On the back of the shirt were the 37 words of the Title IX law.
“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
Dressed for the occasion, Jackson hosted ASU’s Global Sport Institute and organized a panel event to celebrate Title IX and women’s soccer. The “More is Possible” event highlighted the fight for equality in women’s soccer and the issues that are still present in women’s sports more than five decades after those words were signed into law.
“This year is the 50th anniversary of Title IX, which is the US law that has had an impact and influence globally, inspiring women to demand equal treatment on sporting fields and equal pay also,” said Jackson, a sports historian and ASU professor. “And that legacy really starts with this law in the context of women’s soccer.”
Two-time Olympian and World Cup champion Briana Scurry, who attended the event, helped start the fight for equality in women’s soccer. Scurry and the United States Women’s National Team in the 90s demanded equal rights and equal pay by boycotting the first Olympic Games that featured women’s soccer as part of the competition in 1996. The team eventually participated and won the inaugural gold medal for women’s soccer but only after the Federation offered better contracts.
Scurry’s documentary based on her life, The Only, depicts all the behind-the-scenes struggles of the national team. It reveals all the different layers of the team beyond the pitch.
“When you come out to see the women’s national team player, you come out to see any high-level sports team play, you see that one image of that game,” Scurry said. “But I think my documentary shows you that there’s so much more that goes on in how a team or a person gets to a pinnacle.”
The women’s team started the fight for equal pay and 26 years later it finally was won. Scurry and her team gave the current faces of the women’s national team the courage to continue the fight. In September, the U.S. national teams formally signed a new collective bargaining agreement that included equal salaries for the men and women.
The issues Scurry faced were not limited to her gender.. Scurry also faced inequalities due to race and sexual orientation.
“Racism is essentially woven into this country in a lot of ways,” said Scurry, who is Black and openly gay. “And that part of my journey was impeded by the color of my skin. And I didn’t want to believe that, and I didn’t want to think that that was happening. But I realized it, it took me a while (to realize) the fact that I was gay was also woven in there somehow. And I didn’t want to believe that either.”
Although the event, Title IX and Global Football, celebrated just how much women’s sports have changed, it also highlighted the need for even more improvement. With the National Women’s Soccer League reports of abuse, sexual misconduct and verbal abuse being released recently, the fight for a change continues for women’s soccer.
“I think that the league needs to have a complete revamping, I think what the report shows is that there needs to be change at the systemic level,” Scurry said. “All the teams right now just need to continue to come together, the players need to and the fact that they have a Players Association now, a collective bargaining agreement, they have a new policy in place. I think it’s going to definitely be better in this situation with the report.
“If it doesn’t destroy the league, it will definitely make it stronger. And sometimes you need a reckoning. And that’s exactly what the report was.”
Despite the challenges that still lie ahead for women’s soccer in the United States, Title IX continues to provide opportunities for girls and women that other countries lack.
A structured path to play soccer wasn’t established in Mexico while ASU soccer player Alexia Delgado and former Mexico national player Paola Lopez Yrigoyen were growing up, and both players didn’t have women to look up to to make a change.
“You didn’t really aspire much in Mexico,” Delgado said. “The biggest thing you could aspire to was to play for the national team. And other than that, for me, it was like coming to the United States and playing college and getting my education. So that was kind of like a dream for me to come here because we didn’t have a league and we didn’t have anything to look forward to.”
Added Lopez Yrigoyen: “When I was a kid, there wasn’t a guarantee, an equal division of resources for women to play soccer. Not in college, not in schools and not in professional.”
Title IX paved the way for Scurry to pave the way for the next generation of the women’s national team. More is still possible for women’s soccer and although Title IX started the fight, it’s far from over.
“Without Title IX, I’m not here with you at all,” Scurry said. “When I was younger, in high school and junior high school, universities were using soccer as the qualifier for the equity part. I became one of the first five Nike girls because I just happened to be there at the exact right time. Title IX was the best ally I could have ever possibly gotten.”
PHOENIX – Anne Montgomery started her officiating journey over 40 years ago. She officiated football, hockey and baseball among other sports before retiring in 2019.
To sustain a four-decade spanning career is rare. To do it as a woman is even rarer. The Arizona Interscholastic Association said most officials quit around the three-year mark, and the most common answer to why is verbal abuse from fans and parents. One of the problems isn’t that it’s happening – it’s getting worse.
The AIA has had to ask high schools to schedule one varsity football game on a Thursday to help alleviate the number of games that are played on Fridays. This is because of the shortage of officials as more quit or retire to avoid verbal abuse from fans, coaches or players.
“The number one concern is abuse, fan abuse in particular,” AIA director of athletics and officials Tyler Cerimeli said. “It’s very difficult to get people to come out and work when half the people there aren’t going to like you very much.”
Montgomery officiated years before the vast, instantaneous world of the internet. Toward the end of her career, she noticed how the harassment and bullying spread to the internet for perceived missed or inaccurate calls.
“Officials are expected to be perfect all the time and we’re not,” Montgomery said. “It used to be that you’d make a bad call and everyone screams. I’ve been spit on; I’ve had to have police escorts to my car. But today, it’s so much worse because people put it on the internet. It’s not just that one moment in time, it’s endless.”
The harassment caused many officials to leave the job. It’s a thankless job to begin with, and it only gets worse as more people use social media like Twitter to attack officials. Cerimeli says he hears this sentiment during exit interviews with his officials.
The number of officials across the country is down and continues to slip further down. Arizona, which had an uptick in the number of referees in 2021, still remains below AIA’s desired goal. As a result, the AIA has asked 5A and 6A schools to schedule one varsity game on Thursday for the 2022 season.
Mesa Mountain View played its varsity game against Desert Mountain on a Thursday. It was one of 12 games that took place on Sept. 15. Some schools, like Desert Mountain, don’t have a junior varsity team, so moving a varsity game to Thursday has lessened the load for football officials on Fridays.
“Our coaches have done a good job of communicating why (the game is on Thursday), which we all know the why is because we have a shortage of officials,” Mountain View athletic director Joseph Goodman said. “Hopefully, it is a message to everybody that we do our part as a school, as fans, as a team that our officials feel valued and respected.”
Parents, students, cheerleaders, coaches and the band acknowledge the difference in Thursday games that sometimes feel like Friday games.
“I’m going to put in a late night and have to come to school tomorrow,” Goodman said before the Thursday kickoff. “I talked to the security team, and we’re going to make an effort to turn the lights off a little earlier tonight (to) get the fans home earlier because it’s a school night.”
Montgomery believes a key to boosting the number of officials is in recruiting more women to join the ranks.
“Nobody’s recruiting female officials unless it’s sports that women play,” Montgomery said. “One of my officials told me 20 years ago, ‘It’s really too bad you don’t do women’s sports, you really might get somewhere.’ And I said, ‘Well, I like football and baseball.’ They don’t actively recruit women in anything they don’t normally play.”
For many years, Montgomery was the lone female official in the annual football meetings. She would sometimes see one or two other women, but they would quickly disappear.
The AIA does recruit officials but has tried to focus more on retention than recruitment in recent years. For recruitment, the association asks each school to provide one male and one female graduating senior that the school thinks could be a fit. The AIA is also working with schools in the Dysart Unified School District to offer an officiating elective class that high school students can take to get them prepared for a career in officiating.
“If you get into officiating, your odds of making it as a professional official are higher than a player’s odds of making it as a professional athlete,” Cerimeli said. “The odds of making a career out of it if you get in early enough are there, it’s just a matter of adjusting to the environment. We have a countless number of officials working at the Division I level, (at) the professional level that came up from the AIA ecosystem.”
A challenge in recruiting and retaining women is the treatment of women. Throughout her career, Montgomery had been told by referees that crews with women don’t get the opportunities that other crews get.
“Twenty-five years ago, I kept getting thrown off officiating crews,” said Montgomery, who became a referee so she could pick her own officiating crew. “The men were really honest with me. They said, ‘We aren’t going to get any big games with you on our crew because you’re a woman.’ And I hated them for it, but they were right. … I would like to tell you that 40 years later it was easier for me to be an official, but it wasn’t.”
This issue extends beyond AIA and the high school level. Todd Sergi is the Arizona State Referee Administrator for U.S. Soccer. He is connected to all things involving soccer officiating for U.S. Soccer and works closely with the Arizona Soccer Association.
Parts of his job include trainings, instruction, development and reports on officials in the state. Posted at the top of the website, azref.com, is a prompt to submit a report on referee abuse.
“We had a young lady on a match in a tournament that the parents were berating during the match. The director of coaching came on the field of play and verbally abused her (and) brought her to tears,” Sergi said. “When we got the video and the report, it stirred something in us. We said we need to take more of an active role in getting information from our referees in all events.”
Referees, parents, coaches and players can file reports on verbal abuse so the association can track the instances and make better decisions on how to address each case. In its first year in use in 2021, the association received 62 cases of referee abuse.
“It’s been a great tool for us to get information and take action on behalf of the referees in the state,” Sergi said. “Particularly with Arizona soccer, because we have such close ties with them. It is easy to take action quickly.”
The referee issue is two-fold: There aren’t enough people and the majority of them are over 60.
“Most officials when they come out for the first time, they were around sports, their kids were in high school, their kids went to college (now) they’re looking for something to do,” Cerimeli said. “They tend to skew older or middle-aged.”
While the AIA and other officiating bodies work to get younger and keep officials, schools are trying to encourage more sportsmanship from the fans. The AIA has a sportsmanship and ethics committee that has a sportsmanship reporting process where officials can rate sportsmanship from players, fans and coaches. Athletic directors can log on and see how their school and sports programs are doing.
“You have to have officials or else you don’t have a game,” Goodman said. “It’s an investment in ourselves. We have to be good so that we can have these events and outings. You’re investing in what you want.”
There is no simple solution, but Sergi, Goodman, Montgomery and Cerimeli agree that refs need to be treated better if youth sports are to continue.
“Right now, the environment is continuing to get worse,” Cerimeli said. “That is something else we have focused on in the past couple of years, trying to turn around sportsmanship, trying to fix those issues and make officiating more appealing.”
For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org.
