Thanks, Eric.

Following the conclusion of the USA-Italy game, Eric Wynalda, the “expert” commentator for ABC/ESPN made the following comment: There are two kinds of referees, bad and worse. And this one [ref in US-ITA] was worse.” He also said, “Players win games, coaches lose games, and referees ruin games.”

Aside from the abject stupidity of this comment, Wynalda’s statement is surely to have a real positive effect (ha!) on the work I do on weekends and often weekday evenings.

I belong to several refereeing organizations. Every week during the intense spring and fall soccer seasons, I get emails from referee assignors pleading for help on uncovered games. There simply aren’t enough refs to staff all of the games that get played in the metro area in which I live.

When I go to periodic meetings of a couple of these organizations, I am struck by a couple of things. First is the dedication that many of my fellow refs make to the sport. Sure there are some who barely move on the pitch and are in it for the money (no one’s getting rich here). But the vast, and I mean vast, majority of my colleagues work hard at it – study hard, run hard, really try hard.

My second observation: this is an aging population. When I look around the room at these meetings, I see more grey hair and bald heads than (I fit both categories) than I think I should. We need young folks with an interest and passion about soccer to step up and take up reffing or else we’ll see a slow stagnation in the numbers of kids playing because games won’t be staffed. Too often this past season, I’ve either soloed or been a part of a two-person crew (one center ref and one Assistant Ref; we can’t use the two-ref system in a USSF game) in rec league games played by high school age players. Forget making the close offside call on the team attacking the side away from the AR. And if you’re caught deep in the AR-covered end, you also might miss the most blatant offside. There’s too much field and the players are too fast and there’s often too much flow in and out of offside position to be right on top of this play.

Why are there so few folks willing to don the yellow striped shirts? Maybe it’s the disrespect evidenced by Wynalda’s comments. This pervasive feeling among players that there is no such thing as a good ref or that we’re all at minimum bad, if not worse than bad. You hear it often on the sidelines from parents, coaches; on the fields from players. After my first year on the pitch, when I wasn’t very good, I thought about quitting. But then I met some other refs, received encouragement, and decided to work at this to get better. I think I have (just this past season, a losing coach actually told me and my co-ref on a 2-person HS JV game that we were the best he’d seen that season; my colleague this game was The Ref). But for kids starting out, having an adult yell at them, belittle them, insult them, why go back for more? Many don’t.

True story: a young teenage female ref was working a rec league game of even younger girls. A parent of one of the players was yelling at her during the game, complaining of calls. The ref’s mom arrived at the field towards the end of the game to pick up her daughter. She heard this parent’s comments, walked up to him, and said: “That’s my daughter out there.” While that shut him up for the remainder of this game, who knows whether he learned any lasting lessons.

So who is Eric Wynalda? How many World Cup trophies did he hoist during his career? How many championship trophies? League titles? Oh, none. Must have been the refs' fault.

Until Wynalda steps onto a soccer field to ref a game, he should be a bit more careful about his comments. It also might be helpful to ABC’s viewers to invite a ref to provide some expert commentary about this aspect of the game, to actually have someone comment who knows what he or she is talking about. ABC prides itself on being an innovator in televised sports. And this surely would be new: an actually knowledgeable expert.