It will, quite simply, be necessary for someone to do their part. The games can’t happen if someone doesn’t.
Who is that someone? High school game officials, and all comers will be accepted.
From 8:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday, the Texas Association of Sports Officials will be holding a clinic at the Region 16 Support Center in Amarillo.
Officials, both current and brand new, will gather to recommit working games this fall and to become part of a fraternity which isn’t celebrated but is absolutely vital to continuing varsity football contests in the Texas Panhandle through December.
“It’s kind of a recertification process,” said Esrael Silva, the president of the TASO Amarillo Football Chapter. “However, we’re also using it as a recruiting process. We’re about 30 officials short this year.”
That’s not exactly a new tune Silva is singing. For officials old, new and novice, attendance at the clinic this weekend is required if they want to call varsity contests for the 2024-25 school year as well as get their feet wet with junior high and youth games.
Silva, who has been a high school football official for 20 seasons, says about 90 people show up to the clinic each year. That number is barely enough to cover games in all classifications across the Panhandle on a weekly basis.
That’s part of general trend in official deficits.
“It’s a nationwide each sport shortage,” Silva said. “We hear it from baseball, football and basketball. The TASO state board is trying to figure out how to tackle this issue we face as a state. We’re just at the local level trying to figure out how to cover the Texas Panhandle. We’re sitting at about 100 officials right now, and we need to be at about 130 to see that all the games are covered.”
Simply put, official supply hasn’t kept up with demand, and on some nights area games have had to use crews from Lubbock or Wichita Falls if they’re available.
“About 5-10 (new officials) a year is what we’re getting, but we continue to lose our older officials who are 50 plus and stepping away,” Silva said. “They’ve been doing it for 20-30 years and that’s what’s really hurting, we’re losing our veteran officials, due to age and retirement.”
What once seemed like a given when it came to officiating games has now become an issue.
“It’s a huge problem,” said Joel Hill, vice president of the TASO Amarillo Football Chapter. “With our numbers dwindling we can’t take care of the student athletes like we want to. We never want to have to turn anyone away. We want these kids to have good quality officials. We hate telling them we have to reschedule. Our goal is to get to the point where we don’t have to say that.”
As of right now, things don’t look as if they’re getting better on that front.
“It’s absolutely a crisis point for the last four or five years,” Silva said. “I’ve been telling a lot of people that this is a societal issue. A lot of coaches are seeing it as well. I think all the coaches are on our side with the athletic directors and administrators because they see the same thing. They understand that without officials that a contest is a glorified scrimmage.”
Youth movement?
If anybody is going to take the baton for the next wave of officials, it might have to be those who are playing right now. The allure could be staying involved in the game.
That’s what’s kept Silva doing it.
“As football officials, we’re there for the kids,” Silva said. “We love the game and we love the kids. We just want to make sure that this continues to go on and to specifically target the younger generation.”
One of those younger generation officials might be Silva’s own son Brae, who will be a senior at Randall next year playing baseball. Brae wondered what it might be like to follow in his father’s footsteps and was literally rewarded.
“My son got into this as a junior in high school at 16 years of age because you can jump into this,” Silva said. “He started doing subvarsity contests. He made about $2,500 last year doing seventh and eighth grade contests. You can’t do varsity until you’re 18 so we’re targeting high school and college students. It’s the best parttime gig you can find. You can’t make that at Chic-Fil-A.”
But like Chic-Fil-A, it also means not working Sundays. Younger officials in particular can set their own schedules.
Hill thinks the emergence of the kids in striped jerseys is the only thing that will keep the profession going.
“There are those of us who have been doing this awhile and we want to bring up the next generation,” Hill said. “We want to bring them in while we still have enough gas in our tank to teach them. Those younger officials are really what we’re focused on, but we’ll take anyone who is interested. If I could have started this 30 years ago right out of high school I would have, because it’s just such a fun vocation.”
Dealing with the heat
Officials aren’t greeted with a lot of, if any, atta boys after a game regardless of the job they did on the field that night. Such fan and participant apathy, if not outright antipathy, comes with the territory for anybody who does the job.
After a while, complaints about job performance from the stands can be more than one person can handle, leading to a high rate of attrition among officials.
“Our No. 1 reason for people quitting is abuse from the fans,” Silva said. “I believe the coaches and administrators see the same thing. It’s those parents sitting at a middle school football game. We try to treat it like it’s their Friday night, but we’re also trying to teach our younger officials. We’re going to have growing pains and mistakes but we’re going to try to give them our best effort as well.”
Hill said most officials are dealing with the same thing, regardless of age or experience.
“The verbal abuse is probably the No. 1 thing that officials young and old have an issue with and it’s just a lack of understanding,” Hill said. “Everybody thinks their kid is the best, you missed this and there’s a hold on every play. There are five of us and 22 of them, so it’s busy.”
Experience is what allows officials to best deal with verbal abuse the longer they’re in the game. The longer they’re officiating games, the more likely it is to roll off their backs.
Silva wants to protect the newer officials from that as much as possible.
“If we see any abuse at all, we’re really trying to push toward a zero tolerance to keep those younger officials there and to grow them into this,” Silva said. “It takes about three years to get them completely vested in there.”
Knowing the rules. And there are a lot of them
While people are encouraged to come to the clinic and learn how to become a football official, there’s far more to it than meets the eye, and that might be trickier than dealing with those who disagree with a call.
Hill is responsible for training new officials in the area every year. Interpreting the rule book is a challenge no matter how long somebody’s been working games.
“It’s a constant evolution,” Hill said. “I’ve been doing this 15 years and I learn something new every time I open the rule book. That’s kind of the beauty of it. It’s a very complex sport where you are constantly having to evolve and adapt and look at things a different way than what you read in black and white, so you start with this base of knowledge and compound on that.”
Adding to that for those working high school games are new rules added almost annually by the UIL in conducting varsity contests. What needs to be enforced grows bigger every year.
“There are so many rules,” Silva said. “We’re talking all the time about how we can’t believe this rule or that rule. We’re always having to learn about philosophies and standards.”
Hill said that there are offseason study groups for two hours every Monday evening, and that everyone constantly watches game film throughout the season.
As it turns out, officials have to work as hard at perfecting their craft as players and coaches. That’s something fans don’t see, and also something officials don’t realize until they get into the game themselves.
“I kind of refer to it as drinking from a firehose,” Hill said. “My first meeting I walked in thinking ‘I’ve got this down. I know the game of football, I played it and loved it.’ I sat down and within five minutes, it was ‘What have I gotten into?’ It’s a wonderful way to protect our game that we love and it’s something that we constantly have to learn.”
For those interested in learning more, please visit the link https://www.amarefs.org/