Referees needed in area high school sports

These referees love their work and they’re encouraging others to join their ranks for the upcoming sports seasons.  From left: Wayne Burchett, Andy McCready, Ty Hamilton and Harry East. (William Paine/Patriot Publishing)

By WILLIAM PAINE

Patriot Publishing

Who doesn’t love a ball game?

Most everyone has at one time or another enjoyed watching or playing sports. Youngsters in the New River Valley are offered the choice of playing football, baseball, softball, basketball, tennis and volleyball and  though these sports are vastly different in character, they have one thing in common: they all need referees to make sure rules are followed and order is maintained.

Andy McCready, Ty Hamilton, Harry East and Wayne Burchett work as referees as part of the Western Virginia Officials Association, which covers school systems from Bath County in the north to Bedford County in the east and through the NRV. These Virginia official associations provide training and scheduling to referees across the commonwealth, but those willing to do this work is on the decline.

“They’ve all lost officials,” said Burchett. “When I came into this 11 years ago, officials complained that they only got one or maybe two games a week. Now, I got seven games this week. If you want to work, it’s there.”

“We want to attract new officials to join us because each year you have a few guys to retire out of the ranks and it really takes years to develop a good official,” said McCready. “The deadline to enter is coming up on Monday, July 28, when we have our first gathering. Then within just a couple weeks after that, you have to be at clinic and you have to take the rules test. Once you pass those deadlines, you can’t come in the middle of the season. That’s why we’re here encouraging folks to reach out to us so we can get started getting them signed up. Anybody that wants to come in is going to receive a mentor, someone to take that new official under their wing and work with them.”

“Like on-the-job training,” said Hamilton. “On Friday nights we try to put seven officials on the field. That way we have better view as far as penalties. Due to the smaller quantity of officials that we’ve had, we’ve done some varsity high school games last year with only five officials.”

“Two years ago, we had two undefeated teams, Radford and Allegheny, and we had a five-man crew because we didn’t have enough officials in the association to put seven on the field,” added Burchett. “They run 89 plays and 72 of them were pass plays.”

“We look to take anybody and everybody that we can that wants to give us a good 100 percent effort on basically working and controlling the field the way we need to,” said Hamilton.

Pay varies but generally hovers around $90 per game for high school sports. Baseball umpires working varsity games receive the highest pay at $115 per game. Refs working more than one contest in an evening can earn significant fees for their efforts.

How did these fellows decide to become referees?

“I’ve been doing it 23 years, and I got into it once my youngest daughter graduated high school,” said East, who currently works as a Clinical Engineer for GE Healthcare. “I played a lot of men’s competitive softball and I was getting a little bit too old for that, so I decided to go into officiating. I found it a good way to give back to the community and I’ve always enjoyed sports.  Played them all in high school and that’s why I got into it.”

“Getting ready to start number 28,” said Hamilton, who retired after many years from Moog, Inc. “I was like Harry. I had been playing softball and my wife said, ‘I’m tired of you paying to play.’ So, I decided I’d let them pay me to play. I started chasing kids around on the ball field right after my oldest daughter was born.”

“I played rec sports in Pulaski and Andy and Ty, and even Harry refereed my games when I played,” said Burchett, who recently retired from Volvo. “Then, as I got older, I had a kid, and then I coached, and they refereed. Then when my son went through college, I refereed.”

“This will be my 27^th year,” said McCready, owner of McCready Lumber in Pulaski. “I wanted to be around the kids some and once I got into it, I just loved being on the field and I love working with the other officials. We’ve got everything from engineers, to doctors, welders, plumbers, Commonwealth’s attorney’s … It’s been a wide variety of people. And that network also helps me in my life. When I got a question, I can think a minute and I go well ok, I can call one of our docs or one of our attorneys and say, ‘Hey, I need a favor buddy!’ So, it’s really a great group of guys and gals.”

Why be a ref?

“I like seeing the kids, both the boys and the girls develop,” said East. “We’ve seen kids that couldn’t hardly stand on their own two feet and they turn into outstanding high school athletes.”

“I’ve had many a parent come up to me and say, ‘I’ve got two kids out here, age 10 and 12, and you did my games when I was that age’ and they remember me,” said McCready. “Football is a competitive sport but it’s framed by a set of rules that you must follow, much like life, and we have to enforce those rules. People can get excited sometimes when we enforce those rules and it is important that we officials conduct ourselves with even-temperament to be good, positive role models to those kids. It shows them how a gentleman or gentle woman will conduct themselves when things are controversial. People are sometimes fussing at us and criticizing us and you know, we’re not turning around and fussing back. We’re doing our job. That’s what we’re there to do.”

“We’re all from here and we want to help out this community and the kids and when you do these sports, you stay active,” said Burchett. “If anybody says they do it for the money, they’re lying to you. You gotta enjoy it. The camaraderie is the best part. In the 11 years I’ve done this, I’ve made some great friends.”

Those friends responded when Burchett’s house burned down on April 15 of this year.

“You talk about a tight knit community … All my fellow officials got me new equipment, started a Go Fund Me and helped me,” said Burchett. “Just the amount of phone calls and support I’ve got just from my officiating community was unreal. Ty bought me all my baseball shirts and then in football, some of the guys got together and they bought me everything I needed, the pants, everything. It don’t sound like a whole lot but when I left that fire, what I had on was what I had, because we lost everything.”

Speaking with these four gentlemen, it becomes clear just how much they love what they do.

“Some days you feel like you’re more into it, don’t you? Burchett asked.

“I felt like I was having a strong game at Botetourt as a football official,” said McCready. “Just covering my spots, good looks at everything and after the game Wayne said, you had a real good game …because he noticed.”

“Yep,” Wayne confirmed.

“And I said, thank you, I felt like I had a good game,” said McCready. “We see the ebb and flow of emotion as much as anybody. You can just feel the kids get inflated, feel the kids doing well and when the kids get down and start trying to chip shot, you got to step in a say, ‘We’re not putting up with that.’”

“The best is when nobody in the stands is saying, well, the umpires decided the outcome of that game,” said Burchett. “They don’t even know we were there.”

“That’s the ultimate compliment,” said McCready. “No one knew we were there.”

Like everyone, refs occasionally have an off game. Ever wonder if a ref ever believes he made the wrong call?

“When you make a bad call, you know it,” said Burchett. “It’s easiest to do in baseball, when you’re behind the plate but you know when you missed that call but you can’t go back and change it and you can’t say ‘I’ll give them the next one’ because now you’ve got two bad calls. But you got to be like the player. A short memory. We’re human. We’re going to get things wrong but just let it go and try to get the next one right.”

Spectators sometimes make their displeasure known to the refs.

“As long as they yell and they don’t get personal or vulgar in language, you generally let that go but you gotta have thick skin,” said Burchett.

“Most of the time you’re also gonna have to have a deaf ear,” added Hamilton. “On numerous occasions, you will hear comments coming from either the dugout or from the stands and sometimes from a coach. I actually threw out a baseball player this year, first one I got in 10 or 12 years, and it was basically because of his language.”

When asked which games were the toughest to call, all four answered, “Rec League.”

“You got coaches that are fathers that may or may not know the rules and sometimes the players don’t know the difference between offense and defense,” said Burchett. “The rule of thumb is, if it’s going to happen, it’ll happen at a rec game.”

“Parents may be standing five feet off the field and they’re hollering their brains out,” said McCready.

Referees, like players, do occasionally get injured.

“Ty (Hamilton) got run over a couple of years ago,” said Burchett. “A big full back out of Christiansburg, running through the middle, laid him out.”

“He come through and he hit me and all of ‘em said it looked like they knocked me 7 or 8 yards downfield,” said Hamilton.

“He was in the air long enough that I said, ‘This is gonna hurt,’” said Burchett.

“Andy broke his leg one time,” Burchett added.

“I was watching the kids run and I didn’t move and first kid hit me and planted my foot firmly in the ground, and the other kid hit me in the other leg, and I spun 180 with my leg pinned to the ground with cleats, and it just spiraled and broke my leg,” said McCready. “People heard it pop up in the stands. That was a junior varsity game.”

Baseball is a lot safer …

“If you’re behind the plate, you’re going to get beaned,” added Hamilton.

It could be said that a ref has got to have some degree of toughness, both mentally and physically, to do the job well but it’s all part of the game. But the pay is fair and the need is definitely there, even if sometimes they are underappreciated by the spectators. Within their own ranks -there is a strong sense of community.

To join the officiating community, contact McCready at (540) 980-8700.