Public Service Announcement
 

Setting: Wisconsin. Heard a PSA on ESPN radio this evening. It was the WIAA encouraging prior student-athletes to "stay connected to the game!" and "become a high school sports official." Maybe this ad has been around for a while, or maybe it's new....I have no idea. Regardless, a bunch of thoughts immediately entered my head:

1. Does the target audience realize that in most sports, you're not going to immediately get on a high school field/floor? Obviously there needs to be a year or two of tuning at the youth/middle school level. This is like when the Navy runs ads that show planes taking off from aircraft carriers and submarines breaching on an emergency blow.....but they never show sailors carrying trash bags down the pier or conducting maintenance on fire hoses.

2. I had a D1 Boys Varsity game last night with a full gym, a somewhat hostile crowd, an ignoramus coach and two player technicals for dumb stuff. For my 3 hours of active fight prevention efforts I received.....$50. So, does the target audience realize that, when making it to the varsity level in Wisconsin, the varsity compensation is only in the 8th percentile nationwide? I think only some areas in SC and LA may be worse.

3. Does the target audience believe that the increase in spectator harassment of officials in recent years is being addressed by schools, game managers, and the state office? Because I sure don't.

There's a shortage of officials here, so the PSA was no surprise. But as in most areas with shortages, the issue isn't so much about getting new officials as it is about keeping them once they try it out. Transparent expectations, a reasonable evaluation system, equitable compensation vis-à-vis other states, and a sportsmanship revival would go a lot farther, IMHO, than a radio advertisement. If we did all of these things, than word-of-mouth would easily supplant the need for advertising.

$50? LA is not worse than this.

One game? What took 3 hours?

1. I started with a freshman game when I first joined an officials association. I had never done MS or youth ball. I worked an entire year of HS games before I ever worked a game with kids younger than HS age.

2. Is that $50 fee for 2-man or 3-man? If it is 2-man, then that's awful. If it is 3-man, then I can tell you that your local area assignors and schools agreed to take the prior 2-man crew fee and chop it three ways. That screws the officials, imo.
Where did you get your national percentile numbers? I'd like to see that chart/list.

3. You are correct on this point.

Ohio you do every level but varsity until you are a class 1 official. Which you can qualify for after yout second season.

Some schools pay 50 for JV games here.

For a single varsity game, $75 is pretty standard in my area. Anything below that level is substantially less. Single varsity games happen very rarely, mostly in the case of inclement weather cancellations and they play the game on a Saturday morning/afternoon. We've had some pretty icy weather the past few weeks so they are still catching up with these single varsity games in this area.

There is a scale here for games but you have to get beyond varsity to be making more than 50 a game.

However you do get travel so long as you have to leave the town you live in, so often the travel pay is more than you get for the game. Officials in urban setting complain about not getting the travel money but can often get more games per week/ per on weekends than in rural setting,

We only get mileage during postseason tournament games. A couple years ago, I got a call that they really needed someone to cover a game that was 2 hours away. The mileage check was bigger than the actual game check.

So, what's the solution? What are the little details that would make these things happen?

I work the $50 games, too. Most I make here (absent mileage) is $72. Am I worth more? Absolutely.

Do I think your list includes things I would like to see? Sure. How do we make those things happen?

It's easy to move into an area, hate the area, and then bitch about it.

Could be worse, you know. We could live in Arizona and be forced to work every game 2-person.

By the way, I just talked to a school that pays $50 for freshman and JV and $60 (the conference rate) for varsity. I know that some of those $50 schools pay $45 for subvarsity. That's one thing that should be bothering varsity officials.

I was including the hour pre-game period.


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Second hand through my association. It's affiliated with NASO which helped the association prepare for and brief a state district meeting back in the fall.

I think that any solution to pay needs to be a multi-year solution.

The problem with pay in Wisconsin (and I know this first hand from both sides of the process) is that schools/conferences give a $5 increase and then spend 10 years tabling discussion on officiating pay. I have meeting notes that show this.

When I moved here in 2002, we got $50 to $55 for a varsity game, 2-person.

Now it's 3-person and we're getting $50 to $85 for a game (yes, parts of WI pay $85. Note that the $85 is in the most northern, remote areas of the state where they replaced mileage payments with a higher fee).

Let's use $60 as a typical game fee:

Schools look at things this way -- we've gone from paying $120/game to $180/game -- that's a 50% increase. Over the course of a season we need to pay $1320 more (11 boys and 11 girls home games) for basketball officiating.

We look at it like this: I made $60 to work a game in 2006 and I make $60 now.

So there is at least 1.5 sides to this. But the $50 thing is a real problem, I'll agree.

Yes, I introduced a problem without a detailed solution. But I did at least address some worthwhile lines of effort (transparency, credible evals, compensation modernization, and something more than lip service to sportsmanship). My expectation for the licensing fee that I pay to the state office every year would be for the full-time employees in Stevens Point to take a more proactive approach to getting into the details of these issues. I wouldn't even mind paying a little more money for the fee. How about a sliding scale of increasing fees that corresponds to your level? That wouldn't discourage newbies, but it would get the veterans more invested in improvements.

Anyway, I'm not trying to stir the pot so much as I'm starting a conversation about a topic that fascinates me. I'll still go work my $50 varsity games and (don't tell anyone) probably enjoy most of them. But for every one of me, there's a younger official or two who may be disenfranchised by our primitive processes. A PSA isn't going to fix the root problem. It's just lipstick on a pig.

Great point about the minimal difference between sub-varsity and varsity compensation. It's been brought up before but bears repeating. That is a huge problem.

My intent was not to get hung up solely on fees, but to offer this as a comeback, let's assume each team has 12 players on it's roster. That's 24 per game. 24 players probably equates to about 36 parents in the stands. Assuming some other locals and non-student siblings decide to come watch, now we're at 50. So if you charge just one extra dollar at the gate, that's $50 of your $60 difference right there. Charge students a dollar or two as well, and you're easily over $60.

The reluctance to nominally increase admission and/or the temptation to keep it for booster program use is a real obstacle.

Have you ever had a coach argue with you about throwing out a $5 cut baseball because of "his budget?" I have. I could hear the Twilight Zone music playing in the background.

Some teams have new uniforms almost every season, I get that. But I'm just saying what the schools think about this issue.

I will say this -- I made a proposal myself for the conference I'm affiliated with that I thought was fair -- and included a 5-year plan for increases and it passed unanimously. It isn't ALL the schools and conferences who are like this -- it's just some of them.

I agree whole heartedly with everything you said. I work in the other WIAA (Washington) and we get $47 for varsity here (3 man varsity crews) plus mileage if out of town (only one person gets mileage as we are encouraged to ride together). I do feel that sub varsity ($42 for 2 man crew) games should get paid equally to varsity bc they are more difficult to officiate bc of the talent level and the coaches seem more ridiculous.

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