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Thanks for all the responses. For our high school group, we actually have about 5 to 10 female officials. It's about evenly divided between "vets" and "rookies/newbies".
The vets are very good officials. One of them is a former high school star and WNBA player and she coaches a lot of AAU basketball teams as well.
I think one problem I see is that newer officials (not just females) don't always get the encouragement when things start out tough early. When I started several years ago in high school, there was this young gal was about 20. She had never reffed before. The unfortunate thing was that she was a small girl (about 5'2") and not particularly confident.
Our group had mentors but I have to admit, going from a youth league to high school is a challenging experience. The young gal might have needed some more special attention that perhaps wasn't provided. Some of our newer female officials are former players and so they perhaps have a slight edge over females who don't have as much playing experience.
And not to pick on the females, I know a lot of male officials who start out and realize they can't cut it and bail.
As for the youth league I work at, there's a lot of girls who could possibly ref but I'm not sure why they don't. I still see some of my former youth players around, I might ask them what they think about reffing.
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