Ref Shortage

[JRutledge]

Originally Posted by BillyMac

Basketball 24.4 million participants
Baseball/Softball 23.3 million participants
Soccer 13.6 million participants
Football 8.9 million participants
Ice hockey 3.1 million participants

Participation in a youth capacity is different than what happens in actual dollars for most communities and schools. I am in an area where every other year a new conference is forming or teams are leaving one conference to join another all because of football. Yes football might have fewer participants (many schools do not even have a football team) but everything in high school sports surrounds football. Teams are not moving conferences because of what is happening with the soccer team. Football in my state for most schools is one of the biggest revenue generators. Basketball does very well for many schools as well. Soccer is an afterthought. Soccer and other sports are lucky to get as many people attending those games as a JV football contest. Just alone in my state, the football and basketball State Finals (which advertises to get officials) are shown on live TV. The other sports not mentioned might be shown live, but you have to pay for the service with streaming video to see those events live. And all of this influences how we get officials and where they come from.

I belong to an organization of organizations called the Inter-Athletic Council of Officials (IACO). IACO is a group of official's associations that bond together to run area trainings. We have only camps and classes for football and basketball. We used to have a baseball/softball camp, but we lost so much money on that event we had to stop holding that event. We have had people try to start camps in other sports like wrestling and we cannot get enough participation and interest. This is also another reason we can find soccer officials that work multiple state finals and in sports like Football or Basketball, if you get 3 trips to the State Finals you are fortunate. But someone in Soccer might have 6 or 7 trips in their career.

Peace