background check

[BayStateRef]

"Background check" is an awfully broad term. Massachusetts requires schools and youth sports organizations to request criminal information about employees and volunteers who work around children. These records, called CORI, include information about pending cases, convictions and non-conviction criminal case data.

So far, sports officials are not covered by CORI checks. But I found that the state soccer association requires CORI checks for volunteer referees, since the law requires the checks for "all volunteers" of youth organizations.

However, there are no standards that I know that go with this CORI check. Only one person at an organization is supposed to have access to these records, but they have great discretion as to what to do when they get them. They can decide a 15-year-old arrest disqualifies someone or they can decide it was a minor crime by a teen-ager that has no bearing on their ability today. Some organizations have detailed rules to guide these judgments, but most simply follow the minor legal requirements that they obtain the CORI information.

The prevailing view seems to be that those with unsupervised access to children must have a CORI check. Most officials do not have that access. I recall a basketball official last year who had a conviction in New Hampshire for a sex crime with a minor, but was officiating games in Massachusetts. There was a baseball umpire in a nearby town who was charged with a sex crime with a minor. Both of these made me sit up and think about this. I still wonder if basketball officials' associations would be better served by having CORI checks on members and then "promoting" this as a feature of a qualified official.