LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source)- Although school athletics and youth sporting leagues have a multitude of opportunities for kids and teenagers to join in on the sport or sports or their choice, sporting organizers are sounding the alarm that a lack of referees could put a damper on those opportunities. According to the Traverse City Ticker, who recently reported about the referee shortage crisis in Northern Michigan, it’s getting harder and harder to find referees to officiate games in the region.

The Ticker says “The crisis could lead to fewer play opportunities locally, disrupted sports schedules, more travel demands for local teams, and trouble ahead as Northern Michigan looks to invest in new sporting venue infrastructure.”

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Kevin Avery, who has been a soccer referee for the Michigan High School Athletics Association (MHSAA) for more than 20 years in Northern Michigan and is also a registered assigner for the MHSAA (responsible for assigning referees for local sporting) finding referees is “becoming more difficult every year.”

Avery points out that one of the main problems of filling the void of referees is that the state doesn’t have a base of experienced young referees to take the place of the current referees.

Avery says, “In all of Northern Michigan – from Leelanau to Alpena and from Cadillac to Harbor Springs – there are fewer than 60 soccer referees who have been officiating for more than three years. And most of those 60 refs have been supporting the game up north – whether as MHSAA officials or as USSF certified referees – for a very long time. Almost 70 percent of experienced soccer referees in our region are 55 or older.”

He says, “On the soccer club side, about 60 percent of all the referees in the state are actually teenagers…That’s mostly high school kids who want to make a little extra money. But they mostly work the really young age levels [of youth sports], and then when they go off to college, almost nobody sticks with it. As a result, the number of referees in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s is very low. When you get into late 40s, the numbers start picking up again. There’s actually a bigger population of refs who are in their 50s and 60s than there are referees who are in their 20s and 30s.”

But the referee shortage isn’t just happening in soccer. Or just in Northern Michigan. Barb Beckett is a referee assigner for the Northern Sports Officials Association (NSOA), who schedules sporting officials for approximately 185 schools in basketball, football, softball, baseball and volleyball. There are varying levels of difficulty in NSOA finding enough referees to meet the needed demand, with baseball, softball and football causing the most problems. When demand is not met, games get canceled, disrupted or rescheduled.

Beckett says, “We’ve hit that point in the state of Michigan with baseball and softball already, where we need to have schools move games. Or they may only have one official for a game, or the game may have to be canceled over lack of officials. I don’t know the exact numbers, but there were many, many games in the state of Michigan in baseball and softball that were canceled last year due to no officials.”

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In order to help solve the issue, Avery works with the Michigan Referee Committee and United States Soccer Federation to organize local grassroots referee training courses and Beckett is helping to target “sports empty-nesters” or parents of recently graduated high school athletes to fill the voids.

Geoff Kimmerly, MHSAA Director of Communications, said in October of last year, “Basketball is down about 1,300 officials since 2012, and football is down about 500. The last two years, total, we had about 9,200 officials in 2019-2022 and were down to 8,100 last year.”

Despite the shortages, Kimmerly said that the association had been able to play every football game that was scheduled although some had to be moved to Thursday or Saturday because of scheduling conflicts.

The future of youth sports, like many things in Michigan and around the country, is up in the air as long as the labor and volunteer shortages persist.