In a high school gymnasium in rural Ottawa, one set of bleachers erupts in cheers. On the court, the Brockville Blazers manage to sink a shot–only their second so far–with around a minute remaining in the second quarter.
It’s the first round of house league playoffs for the midget girls, and the game is anything but close. The Kanata Cavaliers lead 28-4 before the buzzer sounds, and despite their small moment of success, the girls’ faces are painted with dejection.
When the teams hit the court again after a five-minute break, tensions begin to rise. There’s an altercation in the middle of the court, with two girls struggling to gain possession over the basketball.
Steve Kenny, one of the game’s officials, watches carefully, and realizes if he doesn’t act quickly, a Cavalier is likely going to get smacked in the head with the ball. He blows the whistle and calls a technical foul. This isn’t taken well. Tears begin to flow out of the eyes of number 13 for the Blazers, but the game goes on.
Later, during a free-throw, Kenny checks in with her. She tells him she feels better, but as soon as he notices she’s wearing earrings she’s sent to the bench for a substitute. This, again, is not taken well.
They’re hard calls to make at times, Kenny notes after the game, what you tee up, and what you let go. He’s sitting in the St. Mark High School atrium, wearing a black Under Armour shirt and a well-worn Ottawa Senators’ baseball cap–a more casual alternative to the striped shirt and whistle he donned minutes ago.
The president of the Ottawa Valley Board of Approved Basketball Officials, a physical education department head with the Ottawa Catholic School Board, a high school basketball coach of 32 years, and a basketball official of 22–Kenny speaks about the game with passion.
A self-described high strung coach always ready to tell officials how terrible they are, he attended his first referee training session after being told by an official to try it for himself if he thought it was so easy.
“It is a difficult game, and it humbled me so much,” he admits. “Things happen so quickly that you do miss it. You’re human, and as a coach I didn’t give them an inch on that.”
What happened in this game was nothing compared to what happens in others, he says, adding “boys are worse,” because they get personal.
He recalls a recent game he officiated at Sir Robert Borden, a high school in Nepean, Ontario, where a group of angry students were waiting for him in the atrium after the game. This was after they hurled insults and curses at him for unsportsmanlike calls and ejections he called on the court.
“This is not like a hockey stadium where people will yell and you’re anonymous up in the stands. There’ll be people yelling at me, and I’m four-feet away from them going, ‘Are you kidding me? That’s what you’re saying to me?’”
In 2017, the National Association of Sports Officials surveyed over 17,000 officials from a range of sports in the United States. The study found that 87 per cent of respondents had suffered verbal abuse in their role, while 13 per cent said they had been physically assaulted before, during, or after a game.
Perhaps the most worrisome takeaway from the survey is over half of respondents said sportsmanship is getting worse. And while those in stripes have long faced abuse from spectators, coaches, and players, officials are adamant they shouldn’t have to.
In his first year of umpiring, Don Farr realized during one game at Brewer Park that the players who became increasingly agitated while he was behind the plate, all possessed 30-plus-inch steel weapons.
Farr had called the best game he could, and his partner on the diamond thought the same. But, that didn’t stop a player from following him to the parking lot. It was the first time someone had followed him, and it wouldn’t be the last. Now, Farr knows to leave quickly after his games.
Now a deputy umpire in chief for Softball Canada, the sport’s national governing board, Farr has 25 years of umpiring experience all the way from local youth levels to international tournaments. His 29 years in the military–he’s now ranked as a chief warrant officer for the air force–has helped him keep a level-head despite the verbal abuse he’s experienced in his career, but he’s insistent that shouldn’t be necessary.
“Nobody should handle abuse,” he says, and the stern look on his normally kind-looking face indicates he means it. “But we do.”
“It’s been that way through history, but it’s gotten to be where it’s too much. There’s no holding them back.”
Whether it’s because of social media, or the insistence of freedom of speech, he said he isn’t quite sure.
“We don’t go into the game to suck,” Farr insists. “No one goes out there to say I’m gonna have a bad game.”
“People, players, fans, parents, think it’s alright to verbally abuse officials. Yet, when a goalie lets in a goal, or a shortstop boots a ball, I don’t see the kind of language coming at them, I don’t see the berating of it.”
All Farr wants is respect for the game and everyone involved in it. And much of his work goes into figuring out how to eliminate unsportsmanlike conduct from the game. He’s ran workshops to show officials how they can change how they’re perceived when a game turns sour, and points out officials can submit harassment complaints for governing bodies to look into.
He’s also a big advocate of Respect My Game, a program which asks umpires to bring a card to hand out to coaches and team captains before the first-pitch which encourages sportsmanlike conduct.
However, with officiating at a crossroads for recruitment and retention–Ottawa is operating at around 70 per cent of umpires needed, as some quit due to the stresses of the job–some officials may not get all the support they need to handle raucous crowds and angry athletes, and there’s only so much that organizations can do to cool the situation.
“We’re never going to get rid of it 100 per cent, Canada won’t get rid of it 100 per cent, but it’s just to get the means and the resources to the umpires so we don’t lose those officials,” he says.
“In sports in general, it’s going to be a culture change.”
On a look-out above the ice, Nico Bidin watches an elimination playoff game unfold below him, occasionally scribbling notes into a black notebook. Bidin is a referee in chief, and the youngest in Ottawa at just 25-years-old. His job tonight is to keep a close eye on his men on the ice, two linesmen and a referee.
“Them getting to the playoffs is just as big of a deal for them as it is for the teams,” he says. Just as the best teams move forward, the referees with the best performance during the regular season advance with them, as less officials are needed for fewer games.
As the game goes on, he’s assessing the accuracy of their calls, their positioning on the ice in relation to the puck and players, and how quickly they’re able to diffuse situations that arise after the whistle’s been blown, among other details.
He’s confused when a crosscheck is called with three minutes remaining in the third period, when a couple calls had already been let go. But overall, he’s impressed with their performance–when a brief scuffle erupts in front of Kanata’s net, the stripes got there quick, and there were no audible complaints from the crowd throughout the game.
Bidin is a linesman himself, particularly because he’s six-foot-two and can skate, he says, and has experienced a lot since he began at 14. He’s taken a puck to the face during a game once, resulting in a broken nose and a lot of blood on the ice. He’s also received a death threat from a coach after a game during a charity tournament.
“He just looks at me from three feet away saying ‘I’ll f—king break your neck, you’re lucky, you’re lucky.’ And I’m, like, 19 at the time, but this is still fairly traumatizing,” he remembers.
The coach received a seven-year ban for gross misconduct. “I wish it was life,” Bidin says. “But we’ll take seven years.”
He believes harassment is getting better as less fights break out in hockey and more safety precautions are put in place, but it’s still difficult to keep officials. In fact, he says he loses half of his first-year hires.
“We need to hire like 15 new guys every year just to replace the ones that we’re losing. And usually it’s because they just can’t take the yelling.”
Kyle Whiteman, 23, has been refereeing since he was 12 and working the Ottawa junior circuit for four years now. And while he loves calling the game, the yelling is just background noise to him now, he understands why kids opt to leave for part-time work that doesn’t include constant abuse in the job description.
“If you’re getting yelled at 30 times a game saying that, ‘You’re terrible,’ like, I’m at work right now, I’m not just out here for fun, right? I’m trying to do a job and you’re saying like, I’m shit, I’m an awful person,” Whiteman says. “You don’t even know me. You’re yelling at the jersey, not what I’m actually calling.”
“It’s at a point now where I just roll my eyes and say, ‘okay, yeah, here we go, someone’s yelling again.’ But I don’t care, I just leave it at the rink.”
Steve Kenny is worried about the future of sports officiating. As harassment complaints have increased, he’s lost a lot of people over the last few years. Around three-quarters of Ottawa Valley basketball officials are over the age of 50, and if sports can’t find a way of keeping young officials he worries there’ll be a lack of quality officiating in the next 10 years.
“I come from an era where it just wasn’t that way, but it just seems more intense now, you know? There just seems to be more on the line than there’s ever been,” he says.
The best step forward might be educating coaches and parents on proper behaviour, as well as training officials to the best of their abilities.
“Is it perfect? No. It’s never perfect. You’re always going to have one or two parents who are going to be who they are, they’re going to live their lives through their kids’, you know, games of the week,” he says. “But it’s how we manage those behaviours.”
Kenny’s an emotional person, he says. He brings the game home with him even when he doesn’t want to. He’s angry at the way officials are treated, is flabbergasted by parents’ behaviour, and knows for sure that change is needed.
“I mean, we are the guardians of the game. And I’m fearful.”
Feature image by Tim Austen.
