As Art Watson and Roy Ryan make their way off of the football field Friday night, some sneer in their direction, while others commend them on a good game. They’ve had obscenities directed towards them all night, but are still in good spirits.

“Good game guys,” Watson says to Ryan and the two other members of their five-man crew as they get in the car and leave Glenwood Academy and head back to Auburn.

And that sentiment is as far as the talk of the game goes because these guys don’t care who won or lost, they are high school referees.

“It’s nice to go to a ball game and watch one and not give a crap who wins,” Ryan says.

Ryan, 26, has been a referee of some sort since the age of 15, when he began reffing t-ball.

“I got into umpiring baseball just from hanging around the baseball field when I was a kid,” Ryan adds.

Since then, Ryan has also called basketball, for three years; and baseball and football, for six years.

Ryan says that he got into calling sports from knowing someone on an intramural crew. He says that he thought it would be a good idea since he was planning on becoming a high school football coach.

“I just love being out there around football, the buzz and excitement that’s in the air, and watching people get knocked around,” Ryan says.

Watson, 35, has been a referee for 15 years. He also got involved through intramural sports. Watson was on an intramural softball team and when the team had to have an official show up at a meeting so that they would be eligible to play in the playoffs, he was drafted to umpire.

“I just showed up to represent my team with no intention of actually officiating,” Watson says. “Those that wanted to be an official were separated. They didn’t have enough officials, so that just picked others to join them. So, I got drafted to be an umpire and I liked it so I kept doing it.”

Calling intramural sports is what ultimately led Watson into calling high school.

“I’d gotten involved in intramurals to the point where I was a student manager,” Watson says. “One night my boss called me and said a friend of his had a crew that called high school ball that needed someone to fill in and run the clock. That was the fall of ‘92, by the fall of ‘93 I was on the crew.”

Horace Tyson, 60, has been a referee longer than Ryan and Watson put together. He calls football, baseball and women’s fast-pitched softball and has been doing it since 1972. Tyson’s brothers were referees and they talked him into trying it.

“It’s a lot of fun,” Tyson says. “I enjoy the running and watching the kids excel on the field.”

Becoming a referee is pretty simple. Once those interested are 18 and find an opening on a crew, they must then take a test. If they pass the test they are then certified. There are four books, which include an officials manual, a text book with individual situations in it, a rule book, and a simplified and illustrated book that referees must memorize to pass the test. Crew members must pass the test every year and there are always small adjustments to the rules each year.

There are five members to Ryan, Watson and Tyson’s crew. This includes a referee (white hat), a line judge, a head linesman, an umpire, and a back judge. They also sometime take along a clock operator.

The crew is part of the Alabama Independent School Association, or AISA. This means that they only call for independent Alabama schools, rather than public. Watson said that there’s not too much of a difference between calling for private and public schools, except for the fact that private schools are smaller.

“A big private school is going to be about the level of a 2A public school,” Watson says.

The AISA crews are paid $65 for varsity games, $35 for pee-wee and termite and $45 for junior varsity.

“We don’t get paid enough to do it if we didn’t like it,” Ryan adds.

Roy and Watson say that one aspect of reffing high school sports can sometimes be dealing with coaches, unruly players and parents.

“The way to deal with coaches is to try not to egg them on too much and try to keep a cool head,” Ryan says.

“We let them say what they need to say and when they reach a certain point we say ‘that’s enough,’ ” Watson adds.
Roy, Watson and Tyson did say that they have hardly ever thrown a coach out of a game.

“They have to really push it to get thrown out,” Ryan says. “Last year we had a coach that came across the field at half-time. That’s the only time I’ve seen a coach thrown out.”

The guys add that they have thrown more coaches out of basketball than football.

“I think it’s because you’re in more of a confined space,” Watson says. “In football, if you have a coach that’s really giving you trouble, you have a lot of room to stand back and get out of his face. In basketball you don’t really have that luxury. If he has a chance to get in your ear, he’s going to be in your ear all night long. But most of the time they just take it for what it is.”

But that is not always the case with players. All of the men say that they’ve seen plenty of players thrown out of games for fowl language, two personal fowls, unsportsmanlike conduct and fighting .

Even parents can sometimes step over bounds.

Tyson says that the worst he’s ever seen a parent act was at a baseball game he called at Loachapoka High School.

“We had a bang bang play at first, the guy called him out, the player said something to the umpire and he threw him out of the game,” Tyson recalls. “The mother in the stands comes down, goes to the dugout, gets a bat and charges the umpire. We caught her just in time.”

Ryan says the best way to deal with parents is not to tolerate their bad behavior.

“They can say what they want, but they have no say over anything at all,” he says. “It’s usually just funny. Half of them don’t even know what they’re talking about. The really loud ones are usually the ones that don’t know what they’re talking about 90 percent of the time.”

The referees even have to watch themselves and what they say and do.

The refs give a report card to the coaches before each game that contains all of their names. If a coach believes a referee stepped out of bounds in any way, he can call the AISA office and make a complaint.

But the guys say that they have a rule that they never degrade coaches or their teams, but they aren’t perfect. Sometimes they do things that they regret and sometimes they make calls that they have to overturn.

Another member of the team, Jason Nelson, says that he once gave a kid a high-five after a touchdown.

“He just came up to me with his hand up, and I was like ‘all right.’ But you shouldn’t do that,” Nelson adds with a laugh.

“Sometimes you are wrong,” Ryan says. “If the coach can prove that we’re wrong, then we’ll overturn the call. But that doesn’t happen often.”

“There are five of us and 22 of them, you can’t see everybody all of the time,” Watson adds.

Wrong or right, these guys all say that they really enjoy what they do.
“I enjoy staying involved in athletics,” Watson says. “I grew up, from the time that I was 4, playing some type of athletics. Now I’m too old, fat and slow to do anything else.”

On that note, all of the guys laugh and begin to make plans for next week’s games.