You could see the effects on the scoreboard page of this newspaper in the fall.

Typically, high school football in the area has kept to the domain of Friday nights, with occasional Saturday afternoons or evenings at certain schools. But recent years have brought an increase to Thursday night football, not just in the NFL or college ranks, but for high schoolers. In many cases, Thursday high school games stemmed from an officiating shortage: if officiating bodies don’t have enough members to reach gridirons across the region in one night, spreading out the schedule can accommodate more schools.

It’s part of a wider trend nationally, for all sports. According to a survey published by the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) last February, approximately 50,000 high school sports officials had left the field since the 2018-19 season. The downturn started before the pandemic, but accelerated in the years since.

Last week, the NFHS held an online media availability for four panelists discussing the leading cause found by its new officials consortium: abuse.

Panelists included NFHS Chief Executive Officer Dr. Karissa Niehoff, National Association of Sports Officials President Barry Mano, NFHS Director of Officiating Services Dana Pappas and Erin Trujillo, an active high school basketball and volleyball official in New Mexico and Colorado.

“The reasons why officials do not stay in the profession or leave the profession really center around behavior,” Niehoff said. “When Dana Pappas hosted her first officials consortium last year, it was made loud and clear that we need to do something about behavior. So we committed as the NFHS to work together with NASO to do a specific campaign around behavior.”

NFHS dubbed the campaign “Bench Bad Behavior,” which included a toolkit and videos provided to states to curb abusive behavior along with public service announcements.

Each panelist discussed the state of officiating in 2023 and ideas to improve behavior at sporting events. While NFHS works at the high school level — writing rulebooks for 17 sports and offering online education courses for coaches, officials, parents and students — panelists identified the youth level as not where officiating abuse starts, but often where it’s the worst.

Niehoff described youth sports as a “wild west,” often with volunteer coaches and officials and little supervision from administrators. It can lead to a discouraging environment for new officials.

“The worst-case scenarios that we get here at NASO almost always come out of the youth and rec level, they’re not from the high school level,” Mano said. “That’s because as Karissa said, it’s more like the wild west. It’s really important, I think, for administrators, the people that own the game in quotes, come to the realization that they’re going to have to put some lines in the sand that certain types of behavior are just not going to be tolerated. That’s going to have a bad effect on not only those parents, but in some cases when it gets egregious, then it’s going to have an effect on the child that’s playing. You hate to make that link, but the things that have been tried don’t seem to really be working as (well) as they should be working. So the parents really need to get a life.

“I’m getting more sensitive to this because I have two granddaughters, 11 and 8, and their father, my son in law, he’s really into youth sports, so I’m getting more and more of what that environment is like. And now with traveling teams, you go out of your community, it might be that the community standards that you adhere to in your community aren’t the ones you’re going to, you might feel more uninhibited.”

Trujillo said she’s seen an increase of school security guards or local police officers at events in recent years, likely a response to videos circulating nationwide of fans assaulting officials outside of events or even in the field of play. Other times, the abuse comes verbally, from threats to personal attacks.

“People feel like their $5 entry fee allows them to come into the facility and say or behave however they would like,” Trujillo said. “That’s cussing, that’s leaning over, pointing fingers in the face of officials. We work in very small environments here, sometimes very rural environments and the facility is not large as far as space around the floor, so there’s a lot of spectators and people very close by.

“So they will say things whether it be under their breath or big and verbose with their hands in the air to you from everything from your mother to your heritage to your skin color. All of those things seem to be a free-for-all for their $5 fee to get into the game.”

Mano started Referee magazine in 1975 and founded NASO in 1980. Reports of officials being assaulted left the longtime ref in disbelief.

“The thought of a physical assault against an official was way out there on the moon somewhere,” Mano said. “Today we are getting reports every single week in this office having to do with physical assaults of sports officials. I hate to even get here on this program and say that. When I started the association, I never would have thought here we are four decades later and we’re talking about this and spending all this time, so we need to get a grip on this as a society, as a culture.”

Some states, including New York, have recently passed laws to increase penalties for assault or harassment of sports officials. Pappas’ office receives calls from state associations asking they can implement bans on abusive fans, which she said is up to the state.

Pappas agreed that officials don’t enter the profession for the pay, but notice when they don’t get a raise or compensation for expenses such as travel or uniforms.

“I don’t think that officials necessarily get into it for the pay, but I do think it becomes a retention issue for sure,” Pappas said. “If somebody has officiated for 10 years and they’ve never seen a dollar increase, that’s insulting, it really is. You’re providing a service. So one of the things we’ve really talked with our state associations about is needing to make sure that when you’re working on budgets that you’re factoring in officiating as a cost of doing business. It gets overlooked quite a bit. When you’re looking at the expenses for everything else you’re going ‘Gas is more expensive, uniforms are more expensive, meals for the kids are more expensive,’ and you’re figuring all of this out, but you kind of forget about those officials and the fact that they haven’t seen a pay raise.”

As the number of officials has declined, the average age of new officials has risen, closer to age 40 than 20.

Mano quipped that the shortage would end if officials received steeper pay increases. But more realistically, he thinks officials want more support from administrators on site at events.

“The administrators are in charge, the referees aren’t in charge,” he said of managing unruly crowds. “We’re in charge of the game, we’re not in charge of the environment. So when a crew of sports officials comes to a site, they need to be better taken care of. They need to be recognized, to make sure it’s secure. Do some things that make them feel welcome, that make (officials) feel respected. It’s not always about money. I mean, we can solve the problem we’re talking about today if we started paying $500 a game for high school. (chuckles) We’re not going to do that, the shortage is not going to go away, so we have to do these other things.”

Niehoff called on administrators to work to control spectators, concurring with Mano that officials should not be distracted by crowd behavior.

“We’ve got to work with everybody. School administrators, if you are in attendance at that game, you’ve got to work. Work that game,” she said. “If you are a school resource officer or a police officer hired to supervise the event, be in the gym, be on the field, work the event. I think if fans see that the school message from the administration on down, the community message from police and support and certainly from the coach, it’s got to be a collective approach.”