As I’m under the basket ready to take a charge, a girl plows into me and I slide across the cold polished wood, thinking I had just gotten an offensive foul, but I was wrong when the referee pointed at me and called a block. My coach jumped up frustrated at the ref. The referee glared at him and walked away. I fouled out that game with the foul calls 4-13 and we had 9 more fouls than the other team. What makes basketball referees good? Multiple things can make a basketball referee good, but there is much more that can make them bad. Many basketball referees struggle with finding a happy medium.

One bad basketball referee moment was when we had this younger girl as our referee and it was her summer job and she wasn’t properly trained. She wouldn’t call any fouls for our opponents, but she would call fouls on our team and it was a very bad game. But this girl was getting yelled at by lots of parents and it was very bad. While it may be her fault that she’s not good, the main reason is that these new referees don’t get properly trained.

The girl wasn’t properly trained to be a referee and was just doing what she was taught. This was a very bad experience for me and my team to have to deal with her. Just because there are some bad refs, there are always good ones too. But with the bad refs, there will always be the good referees that you can count on in some of the games.

One good referee moment I had was when we came into a game and it was 7:00 am. We had to play a very bad team and it was 30-8 in the first half, it was my 3rd foul and we knew it was going it be a blowout but the referee really called stuff for the other team, this referee came over to our coach after the game and explained to him how he was calling more for the other team and he was very sorry about that and how he’s normally a better referee than that. He told all of us good game and how we were very good, as our tournament went on we ran into this referee again but this game was a very close game throughout the game, this time the referee was very even for both teams. He was a very different referee than the first experience I had with him. 

Even though the number of people who want to referee basketball is very small, I think people need to take into account how many bad referees there are in the basketball program and we need to train and hire new and better referees than what we have now.