Dude, you were Adkins before Adkins was cool. Way to go! No way I could go 30 years without bread.

You're confused, Beard was the soft rock group in the 70's

Was it a baguette or a biscuit?

EDIT: I guess a few of you beat me to it. :D

I go clean-shaven...even if it means I sometimes get mistaken for a player instead of an official (and it's happened before). :o

Is that written somewhere?

TMI

lol :D

Facial hair is a cultural thing and it comes and goes. When the current over 40 crowd gets out of leadership and the current under 40 crowd gets into leadership, neatly groomed facial hair will be of no issue whatsoever. Until then, there will continue to be old codgers who think facial hair is of the devil.

Ungroomed facial hair, on the other hand, isn't acceptable.

I've worn a Van Dyke style beard for 13 years now and as far as I can tell it's had no effect on my assignments.

Shaving sucks, so I only do it on game days.

I can think of a couple of established guys that have goatees and have worn them forever.

Outside of them, everyone I've ever worked with at the h.s. level is clean shaven.

The timing of this thread is interesting. As some of you may have noted, I have a big game Saturday. As it so happens, for the first time in my life, I am sporting facial hair... a neatly trimmed goatee.

I had a brief discussion with one of my partners early in the season who has been to the state finals and he mentioned that they generally don't select officials with facial hair...it's not explicit or spoken, but that's just the way it is. They also avoid anybody carrying more than 15 pounds of extra weight as well. Again, just the way it is. At that time I said "if I get to that point, I'll shave it" and I didn't think much about it again until this week.

As it so happens, I have received my best schedule ever this year, despite the new facial hair. I was conflicted about it because I'm not sure if the powers that selected me know if I had a goatee. As a result, I've decided I don't want to make it an issue, so I am going to shave it off before I leave the house tomorrow morning.

Reading the comments in this thread up to now have more or less affirmed my decision.

And here's a funny side note...our local newspaper posts the mugshots on their website for anybody who has been arrested on a daily basis. I live in a county of about 500,000 people and this IS Florida so the list is pretty long some days. As an experiment, I looked at every mugshot over the past 7 days and counted and calculated how many were clean shaven and how many had beards or moustches. 73% of the males arrested had some form of facial hair. I don't know if that proves anything, but I find it interesting that 3/4 of (alleged) criminals have facial hair.

So, you're getting play off games and the best games in your association? State Play offs?

If so, then, you are correct, facial hair has no effect on your schedule.

And BTW, when this under 40 group is in charge, they too will grow up and realize that quality officials for the most part do not have facial. JMO.

Image isn't everything, but it is something.

So this means the people that selected you have never seen you? So what is the criteria for your selection?

The tournament is so large and there are so many venues, the state relies on "State approved Evaluators" to grade performance and pass it up the chain. Those evaluations and feedback from the games (no controversies or management issues) plus other criteria (attend camps and field clinics) are used by the state office for final picks. I doubt any evaluators at my games mentioned my goatee.

You're assuming I'm good enough to get these games in the first place. I get the games I want in the quantity I want in basketball. In soccer, I work the gambit from the not-so-good games in the area I live in to the good games over an hours drive away and I do get playoff assignments. So yes, as far as I can tell, it's had no effect on my schedule.

Please. It has nothing to do with growing up. It's culture. That culture is changing. A significant minority of under 40 professionals wear facial hair. Somehow we still manage to be taken seriously, except, oddly enough, by the internet referee corps.

You think quality officials are quality officials because they don't have facial hair? If they all grew ZZ Top beards over night they'd still be quality officials.

If a D1 assignor decided he was only going to assign referees with facial hair, you'd all be falling over one-another to grow a beard.


I agree. However, neatly groomed facial hair is no more detracting from your image than neatly groomed hair.

BTW, I don't think we should be judged by our facial hair, provided, it's neat and groomed.

I also do not think we should be judged by our weight, again, provided we can keep up with the game. It should be about our calls and our mechanics.

And the reality is I've never seen a top D1 official with facial hair (I'm sure there are some, I just can't think of one) or glasses.

When I work college football, I'm expected to squint rather than wear sunglasses -- in baseball, I wear sunglasses everywhere.

Some of these things hold on when they probably should've died years ago.