A leading sport administrator, with over 3 decades of experience working with some of the biggest sport bodies in the country, says the kind of abuse faced by referees at all levels of sport in Canada has reached a “crisis” point that requires drastic measures.
Johnny Misley, a former top official with Hockey Canada and now Chief Executive Officer of Ontario Soccer for the past decade, is at the forefront of the efforts to tackle this issue.
In 2023, Ontario Soccer started a groundbreaking pilot program aimed at eradicating the abuse. The organization equipped its youngest referees with 50 body cameras to serve as a visual deterrent.
“The fact that we have to consider a pilot program to put body cams on referees is really a sad statement of our society today, isn’t it,” Misley says.
Ontario Soccer takes extreme measures
Ontario Soccer followed the lead of the English Football Association (FA), which introduced body cameras for adult referees 6 months earlier, becoming the first sport association globally to do so. Ontario Soccer’s decision to implement body cams on its youngest referees was something so radical it attracted widespread media attention.
“I did my first interview with the Toronto Star back in the spring of last year and it went viral. I must have done about 80 interviews since then on every media outlet you can imagine,” Misley says.
He points out that referee abuse has been an issue for years, but recent incidents have escalated in severity. Misley recounts 2 recent examples from 2023 where people crossed the line at a children’s sport event. In one case, a 16-year-old female referee was surrounded and verbally assaulted by spectators in a parking lot after the game, with some even physically attacking her.
In another case, a player ejected from an adult men’s game, went to the parking lot, pulled out a machete from his car, and chased the referee around the field. Both cases involved the police and charges were laid.
But the worst, Misley says, occurred in a non-sanctioned indoor futsal game where a referee was shot and killed by a spectator.
“Does it take a referee to unfortunately lose their life because someone went crazy after a match in order for us to start to take notice?” Misley wonders.
Ontario Soccer began noticing the growing toll on referees during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ontario had some of the biggest restrictions at the time, resulting in the sport shutting down for almost 2 years. By 2022, they started to see signs that players were returning because they missed the game but noticed a troubling trend when it came to their officials.
The pandemic takes a toll
“What sent a red flag up for us was the referee numbers were totally the opposite [than for players]. We saw a dramatic drop to a point that we were at 42% of what we had before the pandemic where the player numbers were exceeding pre-pandemic numbers,” Misley explains.
When they did a deeper dive to find out why referees weren’t coming back, there were a few factors, but the leading cause was referee abuse.
“For a couple of years, our veteran referees especially, they had a couple years off of not being yelled at and in some cases, physically assaulted. To them, it was time to move on,” Misley says.
Misley, like many sport administrators in the country, noticed a shift in behaviour following COVID, with people becoming more aggressive or ill-mannered towards referees and sport officials. Faced with the alarming numbers around attraction and retention of officials, Ontario Soccer acted quickly by implementing a zero-tolerance policy and encouraging cultural change within the sport.
“We decided that enough is enough. Fancy posters and marketing campaigns can only go so far from a preventative education standpoint. We felt we had to look at this as a cultural issue. Soccer, being such a dominant sport worldwide and with the profile we have, we wanted to see if we could speak up on behalf of all sport and make a difference in this.”
This included creating a five-minute timeout referees could utilize to pause the game and to de-escalate tense situations. They also looked at their discipline policy and how they deal with referee abuse situations. For their zero-tolerance policy, they had a declaration signed by their Board and district presidents to send a loud message to everyone involved in the game.
Referee abuse common in other sports
Ontario Soccer is not alone in this battle. Across Canada, grassroots sports organizations are facing a similar crisis when it comes to attracting and retaining referees due to poor pay, limited support, and escalating violence. Some say parents have too easy access to the field and the referees in grassroots sport, which can lead to physical and verbal abuse.
Several minor sport organizations’ including the Ontario Minor Hockey Association are implementing a Green Arms Bands initiative this season where all new referees 18 and under wear green arm bands over their pinstripes to remind parents, coaches and others that the referees are minors who are learning the game and need to be respected. In Nova Scotia, 8 provincial sport organizations, including soccer, softball, volleyball, baseball, football, lacrosse, rugby and basketball, have united to implement similar programs. Several have also run online social media campaigns with the hashtag #NoRefNoGame.
Adding to the present issues is social media, according to Ron Foxcroft, a Hall of Fame Canadian Basketball referee.
“Abuse on social media is the big thing that’s changed for referees in the past decade,” Foxcroft says.
He notes that while referee abuse used to end with the final whistle, it now continues online, further discouraging young referees from staying in the profession.
Referee abuse leads to officials quitting after third year
Foxcroft is on the Board of the North American Sport Officials Association (NASO) which represents 36,000 officials, referees, and umpires, most of them at the grassroots level across North America, including dozens of Canadians. He highlights a troubling statistic and trend: “66% of referees at every level never get to year four.”
Foxcroft almost became one of those statistics. He was 21, in his third year and refereeing a university championship basketball game in Ontario when he made a call against the home team.
“A fan came out and attacked me, luckily security intervened, and quickly got the fan away from me. But I’ll tell you it was traumatic, and it was traumatic enough that I had decided to leave officiating.”
It turned out only to be temporary. Fortunately, a journalist who had covered some of his games persuaded him to continue. Foxcroft is happy he listened and stuck it out as he went on to have an illustrious career and earned a front row seat to some great sporting moments. He made history as the first Canadian to ever referee in the NCAA and officiated thousands of games in 30 countries including the Olympic gold medal basketball game in Montreal in 1976. He was also at centre court, refereeing basketball legend Michael Jordan’s first college game.
Despite all the incredible memories, Foxcroft is still haunted by 1 mistake: a goaltending call made in error after a triple-overtime NCAA game, which aired on ESPN in the 1990s. The game had been taxing for everyone including the players and referees and Foxcroft says he lost his concentration for about 10 seconds at the wrong time, allowing the wrong team to win. Years later, he sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night having nightmares about that game.
“That game was in the 1990s and this is now 2024,” he says. “But it was traumatic. I was sick emotionally after the game because I cost the team the game on national TV.”
Foxcroft, who now evaluates referees for the NBA and trains new officials, emphasizes the importance of mental resilience in officiating. “You need hundreds of successful games to mentally deal with the 1 game that’s, shall we say, unsuccessful or where you have a traumatic incident.”
He says referees also need good mentors, people who they can turn to when things go terribly wrong.
“You know, when I went out there in front of 20,000 people with my crew of 3, they’re the only 2 guys that liked me,” he recalls. “The fans, 50% of them are for 1 team and the other 50% for the other team so you’re on an island alone, without a boat and without oars.”
Surveys of officials paint bleak picture
In 2023, NASO surveyed its members to reveal stark data concerning referee abuse: parents were responsible for the majority of incidents of poor sportsmanship with 13% of referees reporting being physically assaulted during or after a game; 49% of the respondents have felt unsafe or feared for their safety due to bad behaviour and 67% have had to remove a spectator for bad behaviour.
Barry Mano, NASO’s founder, says every week he hears a story that blows him away. A former International Basketball referee, he oversaw thousands of games without incident. But he’ll never forget one game he was doing in Mexico. At the halftime of that game, an unhappy fan walked by him in a crowded arena, put a gun to his ribs and said something in Spanish. “I didn’t quite understand the words, but I understood the meaning.”
He says in the old days, if you learned the rules of the game and the mechanics and went out and called the games, that was all a referee needed. But now, that will no longer suffice, and he says just like athletes have access to mental health experts and training, referees need that kind of support as well to understand what they are getting into and how to deal with it.
“It wouldn’t be the first thing anybody would think about that there’s support needed for referees at the grassroots level when it comes to their mental health. But they probably do need people to talk to about what they’re going through more than at any other level, frankly, because of what’s happening on the sidelines and in the stands at those games,” Mano says.
Tolerating the intolerable
The NASO statistics echo what a leading Canadian researcher has found in her work with Ontario Soccer. Dr. Tracy Vaillancourt, a professor specializing in Children’s Mental Health and Violence Prevention at the University of Ottawa, is leading a study on the mental health impact of referee abuse in collaboration with Ontario Soccer.
She has been surveying 1200 adult soccer coaches in Ontario, Saskatchewan and British Columbia and her preliminary findings are startling: 35% of the referees experienced physical abuse, 94% experienced verbal abuse, and 64% felt unsafe, while officiating. The bulk of the abuse takes place in youth competitive games where a lot of referees are cutting their teeth and Dr. Vaillancourt says that sport seems to tolerate the intolerable.
“I’ve been studying violence and mental health for more than 25 years, and so I know what these rates look like across intimate partner violence, school bullying, other work environments. You just never see it at that level. I think the reason why it’s so high with officials is that in a sense, it’s tolerated and even sanctioned. In a lot of ways we think that it’s part of the game, the culture of the sport so we turn a blind eye to it. I’ve always said if this happened in any other area, it would be the front page of every newspaper.”
Mental health support needed for young officials
Dr. Vaillancourt says she needs to collect more data from her study with officials to see the long-term impact on mental health. Those that experienced higher levels of abuse also reported poor mental health, symptoms of anxiety and depression, and had a higher intention to quit.
“It’s quite a hazardous job to be a soccer referee in Canada. It’s actually a hazardous job to be a referee of any sport in any country. This is something that happens everywhere. From our data, they are the ones that need the mental health support the most. They’re very vulnerable.”
Misley says he isn’t sure the exact reason for it and whether the body cam pilot program and other measures are having an impact, but Ontario Soccer has seen 85% of its referees return to the game, almost doubling the number it found coming out of the pandemic.
He doesn’t want to get too far ahead of himself until they have more data from the research that has happened to date, but Misley says Ontario Soccer is likely to expand the body cam pilot to other age groups. He doesn’t believe trying to change the culture will be a short-term issue.
“With referee abuse, if we’re going to make a dent to change the culture, we’ve got to look at this as a systemic problem and something that is going to take time to change over the long-term,” he says.