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HOUSTON — Joe Martin, executive director of the Texas High School Coaches Association, said Sunday that a shortage of officials is a “huge concern” with the start of the high school football season about five weeks away.
“We had several teams that could not play on Friday night [last year] because there weren’t officials,” Martin said on the opening day of the THSCA coaching school and convention.
Michael Fitch, executive director of the Texas Association of Sports Officials, said that TASO has just under 5,000 officials right now. He wants to get to 6,000, even though the numbers have never been that high for football.
“If you compare the numbers today to 2022, we are a little bit ahead [at this point in the offseason], but we have not reached where we were at the end of 2022. Hopefully we will get there,” Fitch said. “I think we will get closer to the 6,000 range by the end of the season. People are notoriously late for coming back.”
If there aren’t enough officials to cover a game, a school will be asked to play on Thursday or Saturday.
“We do that as a last resort,” Fitch said. “This is Texas. Friday night is football night.”
The abuse that officials have to deal with has driven many out of the profession — and scared away some that were considering joining. TASO is also trying to catch up to its numbers from before the pandemic, as it lost about 12% of its officials in the 2020-21 school year.
TASO is taking steps to curb that problem.
If it receives three incident reports indicating excessive verbal abuse, and or physical abuse — including threats of physical abuse — directed at officials by players, coaches or spectators from a school, then those reports are presented to the TASO Presidents Council. If the council deems that the reports demonstrate a failure to control the players, coaches, staff or spectators, then the school has seven days to come up with a plan to stop the unruly conduct or it will lose the use of TASO officials for all sports until it complies.
Those who are 18 or older can officiate games on the field, but TASO is also hiring teenagers who are 16 or 17 on a provisionary basis, and they are allowed to work the chains, be a clock operator or help with a junior high game if they are working with an experienced crew. Football officials are paid based on a percentage of the gate, and with a pay increase coming this year, they can make a minimum of $90 per game and an average of $125, and they are also reimbursed for travel.
“The younger kids are the ones that we are missing,” Fitch said. “If you look at our average age, it’s right at 50 years old. We’ve got more people over 60 than we do under 30, and that’s a concern.”
To help with that, TASO started its Students Today are Referees Tomorrow program (START). TASO wants coaches to identify graduating seniors who aren’t going on to play in college but might make good officials, and TASO will follow them after high school and try to recruit them while they are in college.
“We haven’t had a lot of success with that,” Fitch said.
TASO is looking inside and outside of its organization for help with recruiting new officials.
“Our best recruiting mechanism is ourselves,” Fitch said. “We ask our [officials] to bring a friend, bring a co-worker, bring a family member. When I talk to athletic directors, I remind them that some of our best officials are educators. When I started many years ago, we had a lot more teachers in the officiating profession than we do today.”
On Twitter: @DMNGregRiddle
Find more high school sports coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.
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