Viewpoint: If abuse of refs continues, we will skate away from the game

By Daniel Vazzoler

The life of a minor hockey official looks tempting at first. You practically get to make your own schedule, it pays well, the hours aren’t long and you get to have angry parents and coaches screaming at you.

Wait, that last one doesn’t sound so fun. And yet I continue to work as a referee as I have for the past eight hockey seasons.

Abuse and harassment of officials in minor hockey isn’t a new issue, with stories about the subject popping up in national headlines every now and then. But the issue runs deeper than the one or two outrageous cases that get talked about every year.

I’ve had parents and coaches call my work “f—ing bull—t” or shrieked that I should be ashamed of my performance. Bad enough. But back in 2015, one of my colleagues got into a fight with a trainer in Stittsville, Ont. after officiating a minor bantam game.

The reason for the altercation? The trainer didn’t like his son receiving a game misconduct for getting into a scuffle during the post-game handshake.

More recently, a Feb. 7 news story from Saskatchewan detailed how referees had to end a game early due to severe abuse they received from parents and coaches. The refs kicked out one coach who “told us we’re supposed to put up with some of this (abuse),” official Kyle Chudyk told a reporter. “In his mind, it was our job to put up with harassment.”

To me, the last sentence from Chudyk is the crux of the problem. Fans and coaches think they can yell whatever they want at referees and just get away with it.

A study done in 2012 by researchers from Toronto Western Hospital examined the harassment amateur hockey referees have to endure  in order to allow children to enjoy Canada’s national past-time.

They found 92 per cent of the 632 referees surveyed faced aggression and anger from parents or coaches. These acts of anger, the report said, ranged from getting spat on to getting cross-checked in the head to getting pucks shot at them by players.

The results should be shocking or at least surprising, but my experience on the ice makes me think they reflect the routine reality for many referees.

It seems like after almost every game I officiate, the other refs and I tend to talk about how some coach was yelling during the game, that we’d missed an off-side by “three feet” or made some penalty call the coach objected to because his team did the same thing earlier in the game and no call was made .

In the end, the solution from the refs’ point of view is always the same: let’s have parents and coaches go through a referee training clinic, have them glide a day in our skates and see how they’d make the calls. The Toronto study said pretty much the same thing: that educating parents and coaches about officiating would help combat the abuse.

The years of being berated by coaches and parents has gotten me — and other refs — thinking about how much longer we’re willing to put up with it.

If abuse of officials continues, either there won’t be officials for games — or parents who can’t control their tempers could drop their kids off at the door of the arena and come back to pick them up after the game.

Better yet: keep the abuse in check.