How many football officials are in the US?
 

I asked this same question on the NFHS forum so I thought I'd do the same here for more information.

I'm conducting research for a new book on football officiating surrounding the topic of what it takes to excel at football officiating. I am interviewing NFL and NCAA officials as well as NCAA conference supervisors on their views of what you must do to officiate football at the highest levels.

I was trying to estimate the number of high school and college football officials. Would anyone like to take a shot at providing a number?

Use this to get an educated guess.

HS-
Take one state at a time. Find out the number of high schools, divide in half then multiply by 5. After doing calulations for each state, add them together.

College-
Get the total number of teams from each conference plus the independants, divide in half then multiply by 7.

This would give a pretty fair estimated total.

You could always ask Referee magazine. In the past they have published numbers of officials in various sports in the US.

About Referee


If you care about Europe, we use NCAA Rules, rough numbers that may be a couple of years out of date......

Austria 50
Belgium 20
Czech 20
Denmark 200
Finland 150
France 300
Germany 880
Ireland 10
Italy 100
Netherlands 40
Norway 50
Poland 15
Russia 10
Spain 50
Sweden 250
Switzerland 50
United Kingdom 100

However what you have to understand about officiating in Europe is that for many countries the only way they get enough officials to cover games is to force teams to to supply 2 or 3 guys each year to officiate.
So the figure of 250 for Sweden for example sounds high, in reality the number of neutral officials who are not press-ganged team members is probably less than 50.

UK does not currently use this type of system (but may in the near future) and has about 100 officials of whom maybe 70 working regularly.

There are 718 football officials registered with the Arizona Interscholastic Association as of this morning.

I submit the more practical answer, especially in those States where 3, 4 and even 5 man crews deal with JV and/or varsity HS football, is simply, "not enough".

The combination of the game's popularity continuing to expand, with more schools introducing the game to more levels, where expectations of perfection, although publicly recognized as unreachable, continue to expand while the number of experienced (competent) officials is either stagnant or dwindling is an accident waiting to happen, where it hasn't already begun.

There are about 630 high school football officials in South Carolina

There are 870 Nebraska plus 14 others from different states who are registered with the NSAA (Nebraska School Activities Association) to referee varsity contests. There are 1671 people registered primarily in Iowa. There are an additional 176 others who registered in other states who are also able to officiate in Iowa.

There are about 1000 football officials registered in 2008 in Kansas. I would guess about 15% of those don't work any varsity games due to experience or personal choice. We have about 350 high school teams so on any given Friday we need about 830 officials as we have both 5-man and 4-man games.

73

According to the KSHSAA website, the number given is 1,402 registered officials for football in Kansas.

You are right. When you use that search engine it comes back with 1402. However when you go through the official's directories that they mail out the number is much closer to 1000. I wonder why the difference. Either way we still only need about 830 per Friday night. The biggest problem we have around my area is getting enough guys to work the kid's games on Saturdays.