It was a chilly March afternoon, and a handful of parents sat in the bleachers in Herriman watching their daughters play in a non-region softball matchup between Mountain Ridge and Fremont high schools.
The Sentinels had jumped out to an early lead, but the Silverwolves had strung together four runs in the fourth inning to retake control of the game, and they still had a runner on third. The next batter stepped to the plate and hit the ball to shortstop, and the defense made a play for home.
The Fremont fans, although few in number, made sure they were heard — especially after longtime softball umpire John Beck raised a clenched fist with a bent elbow, signaling the runner as out.
“That’s a horrible call.”
“Open your eyes.”
“You’re garbage.”
To Beck, it was an easy call. From his vantage point, feet away from the play, the catcher had tagged the runner’s leg ahead of home plate.
To the Fremont crowd, Beck had just gotten in the way of a rallying team that was about to extend its lead.
Beck isn’t infallible, but he’s made that exact type of call hundreds of times. He’s also heard all of those sorts of taunts before.
These days, though, it sure seems to be happening more often.
Across Utah, that kind of fan behavior is no longer an occasional nuisance, and it is leading to a growing shortage of high school officials. State administrators say abuse from parents, coaches and fans has pushed many experienced umpires to quit, while discouraging new recruits from stepping in, leaving some games understaffed or officiated by a single umpire.
Beck has been holding on, but after 45 years behind the plate, he’s long since grown tired of the abuse. And as the Salt Lake City-area softball umpire president, responsible for making sure that games get staffed with qualified officials, he’s seen the impact on the ranks of officials willing to do the job that allows these sports to even be played.
“Even within our own ranks, you’ll have people who turn sour,” Beck said. “We all get old, and all of a sudden, I think the love of the game, you just start to lose it.”
‘Never interact with the crowd’
Officials are instructed to never turn around to engage with angry fans, even if it is only to defend themselves or explain a call. If the crowd gets really bad, the best an umpire can do is ask a coach or athletic director to intervene.
“We tell all our umpires, ‘We never interact with the crowd, never,’” Beck said. “That only leads to bad situations, and that’s where we lean on the administrator’s job.
“You have to turn to the coaches and the administrators who are supposed to be on site. They help you with crowd management and control.”
Coaches aren’t always cooperative — they’re often angry, too. And school officials aren’t always immediately present. So, during that game in March, all Beck could do was tune out the crowd and focus on officiating the next play.
And over the decades, he’s gotten good at that. Being the center of a crowd’s anger might be some people’s nightmare. For Beck, it’s just a regular Tuesday.
But that doesn’t mean it should be, and since 2020, crowd behavior has grown as a concern for the Utah High School Activities Association, officials from which have been seeing an increased number of seasoned officials step away from the job — increasingly resulting in games that don’t have enough officials.
Flying solo
Tinnielle La Prelle quickly realized that she had made a mistake. She also knew there wasn’t anything she could do about it.
It was March 24, and La Prelle had been assigned to cover a Region 10 softball matchup.
She knew before the game that she was going to be calling it by herself. La Prelle had received a call a week before the game from Salt Lake-area umpire assigner Don Davis, who is responsible for assigning umpires to high school games in Salt Lake County, Tooele and Park City.
“He let me know that we were really short-staffed and I think we had 70 games that we had to fill that day,” La Prelle said. “Unfortunately, when you’ve got 70 games and only a handful of umpires, you take what you can get. He just walked me through it, let me know that he was confident and to give him a call if I needed anything or if anything happened.”
Something did.
The incident occurred after a batter stepped to the plate and made contact with the catcher’s mitt. The call, which La Prelle made correctly, was for catcher interference. And out of caution, she called a dead ball so that the catcher could have her hand checked for a laceration or broken bone.
But according to the National Federation of State High School Associations’ rule book, which the UHSAA uses, the call should’ve been a delayed dead ball — which would have allowed the runners on base to play it out and potentially advance.
“You can’t reverse a dead ball,” La Prelle explained. “So, because I called the ball dead, there wasn’t a whole lot that I felt I could do at that point.”
The coach of the team at bat called La Prelle over. But when La Prelle explained herself, the coach became furious.
“I let him rant, and I asked him, ‘Coach, do you have a question?’ And he continued to kind of blow up on me,” La Prelle said. “I just let him calm down and blocked it out from my memory for the most part and moved on with the game and did my best to call what I believed was a fair game.”
Would having an officiating partner present have helped diffuse the situation? That’s impossible to say. What La Prelle and other officials do know is that they have increasingly been placed in these situations and are likely to be again and again in the future.
In any week during the spring sports season, there can be anywhere between 150 and 250 varsity softball games in Utah — and often just as many sub-varsity games. Those games are all supposed to have at least two umpires, and even that number puts officials at a disadvantage. Systems with three or four umpires are ideal for the best coverage, although very rare in high school play.
And what that means isn’t just that officials don’t have another teammate present when something goes wrong — but also that they’re more likely to miss a call in the first place, sparking the abuse.
“Recently, there were four or five games that were single-person umpire because there wasn’t enough umpires to fill all of the spots,” umpire Devin Hathaway said. “It’s a concern, and sometimes you do end up doing a lot of games, maybe more than you want.”
Hathaway said it’s not just harder to make the right call as a single umpire — it’s also more physically demanding. “Later in the season, I think it gets a little physically harder, and you’re a little more tired and a little sore,” he said. “Sometimes, umpires aren’t able to go to their games because of health issues, and then that can add to the load of other officials as well.”
Stepping away
To Jeff Cluff, who has been the UHSAA director of officiating for 12 years, the shift has been unmistakable.
“What started to happen was we had a lot of our 20- to 30-plus-year seasoned officials start to decide that they weren’t going to officiate anymore,” Cluff said. “That’s a large makeup of whatever sport you’re talking about. We have a lot of people who have worked for decades, some even 50 years.”
To Cluff, there’s no mistaking what is driving many of the retirements.
“One of the biggest reasons we have a hard time retaining people is because of people leaving because of the bad behavior of parents, of coaches, of players,” he said. “But mostly from parents.”
The rise in poor behavior in recent years isn’t just noticed by the UHSAA; officials across the country have also taken note. They also aren’t relying just on anecdotes.
In 2017, when the National Association of Sports Officials conducted a comprehensive survey of tens of thousands of sports officials across all 50 states, 52% of respondents indicated that they felt as though sportsmanship was getting worse. When the survey was redone just six years later, that number had jumped to 69%.
The survey also sought to ascertain how many officials have “ever felt unsafe or feared for your safety due to administrator, player, coach, or spectator behavior.” In Utah, 57% of the respondents answered “yes.”
And nationwide, about 1 in 8 officials said they hadn’t just been afraid — they’d actually been assaulted during or after officiating a game.
Day work
The risks of verbal and physical abuse may also be driving the officiating shortage from another angle: There are also fewer new officials coming in.
Already, sports like baseball and softball present challenges for people who might be interested in getting started as a sports official. Those games are always played outdoors, and very few high schools have lights, so they cannot be played after sunset.
That means nearly every game is either played in the morning or more often in the afternoon — and that can be a real problem for new umpires, especially because it requires them to work in the middle of the day, automatically eliminating anyone with a typical day job.
“With football or basketball, a lot of those are evening games. But for softball, without lights, nearly all the games start at 3:30,” said Hathaway. “I think you tend to get a lot of the umpires that are older because they are retired or maybe semiretired from their other jobs.”
But, Hathaway said, someone who starts umpiring that late in life probably isn’t going to have a decades-long career.
“If they’re starting at 65 or whatever, they might only have five, six, or seven years in them,” he said.
Once the few new applicants are hired, they need to be trained. And even if that new official knows the game well — and that’s not always the case — it’s not as simple as sticking them behind home plate and having them shout “Play ball.”
It’s true that, in Utah, new high school umpires can be certified after passing a rules test and attending a preseason clinic. But ideally, veteran officials say, an umpire should have years of training — not just in on-the-job situations but also in clinics — before crouching behind the catcher in a varsity-level game.
Newcomers are also supposed to be shadowed by a more senior umpire when officiating sub-varsity and varsity games early in their careers. And during varsity games, trainees are solely supposed to be base umpires. It’s only later on that a trainee will swap with the senior umpire and get behind home plate during sub-varsity games.
“It takes hands-on experience,” Beck said. “Book learning is one thing, but being on the field and actually doing the game are two different things. When they’re brand new, one of us will come out and shadow them out in the field because they’re like, ‘Where am I supposed to go?’ Then, after or even in the half-inning, you debrief.”
Trainees are also usually assigned to games that are expected to be less competitive so they can learn in a less stressful environment. Often, trainees are sent to scrimmages to get umpiring experience in as low-stakes an environment as possible. Yet even at these sorts of low-stakes competitions, behavior can get out of control.
‘You could tell he was scared’
Heather Bankhead was prepared to step in to calm things down. But she was also deeply dismayed that she needed to.
It was a Saturday in late March, and Bankhead was overseeing a scrimmage game in which a very new umpire was getting practice behind the plate. “You could tell he was scared,” Bankhead said.
Both coaches had been informed ahead of the game that the umpire was learning — just as their players were. And yet both ended up blowing up at the new official.
“Unfortunately, we did have to step in at one point and remind coaches for one game that, ‘This is a scrimmage game. You knew coming into this game that we were going to have new umpires,’” Bankhead said. “We had to remind these two coaches that he’s learning. We told them to take a deep breath, and we’ll make sure the rules are correct, but he’s not going to be perfect.”
To Beck, it’s no wonder many trainees don’t last.
“Even if you recruit, whether you get 10 or so one year, you’re probably only going to retain less than half of those,” Beck said.
Cluff agreed.
“I think the hard part is you have some people who put themselves outside their comfort zone and decided to come and officiate, and then they go, and they miss a call,” he said. “Missing a call is to be expected in our sub-varsity contest, and even sometimes in our varsity games. While we expect people to be perfect, they’re not going to be.”
Cluff has lost patience with parents who scream at junior officials. “You have some parent who thinks that it’s the Olympics and they’re going to win gold by winning that game,” he said. “It causes a real issue.”
‘Multisport officiating’
About half of the people registered with UHSAA are already officiating multiple sports. If the association is going to be able to staff all of its games as the ranks continue to diminish, it may need more people to become two-sport officials.
“There are some that work two sports, a fall and a spring or a fall and a winter, and they may do lacrosse and basketball or another combination,” Cluff said. “So, we have a lot of multisport officials that are at our fingertips, and that’s how we’ve been able to be successful in not having sports be canceled.”
Davis is already doing that. He started his officiating career in the late 1980s as a baseball umpire. When an opportunity to referee soccer emerged, he was at first hesitant — his only experience to that point was assisting in coaching his son’s soccer team. But the chance to cover a sport that required him to be more active than he was behind home plate was alluring, and Davis decided to give it a try. And almost immediately after passing the soccer rules test, he was scheduled to cover a varsity game.
The night before that game, he stayed up late to study the rule book, trying to visualize the nuances of rules he was only just learning. Things went smoothly the next day, and the risk he took in learning another sport grew into passion for multisport officiating. Over the past 40 years, he’s officiated softball, baseball, soccer, basketball — and, most recently, volleyball.
Recently, due to the shortage, UHSAA officials asked Davis if he was interested in becoming a lacrosse official, too. But, for the first time in his career, he declined.
“I was already booked with these five other ones that I was doing,” he said. “I just thought, ‘How can I get one more into my schedule?’”
The UHSAA is also trying other methods of lowering the barrier to entry for new recruits, including waiving registration dues for new officials. That’s been working in some sports, but it’s been less successful in others, such as girls’ lacrosse and softball.
“We have waived the registration dues to become an official for four years in a row,” Cluff said.
But that’s not a sustainable strategy forever, he said.
“How do we retain those people in one, two and three years? We waived their dues this year. So where are they going to be in three years from now? Hopefully, they stick with it, and hopefully they continue to officiate,” he said.
Ultimately, though, in a world in which parents and coaches have made the job harder and less satisfying, officials’ leadership believes they’re facing an uphill battle to keep qualified officials on the field.
“We’re not as nice as we used to be,” Beck said. “A lot of these people just do it for their own benefit and fun and all that. So, when that stops, and you get yelled and screamed at, you’re like, ‘You know, there’s not much money in the world to make up for that.’”
