From the Nov. 29, 2004 issue of Soccer America Magazine
By Mike Woitalla, Soccer America Magazine
A few months after he had refereed in the 1990 World Cup, Vinnie Mauro traveled to Alabama to officiate in the Sun Belt Conference championship together with longtime college refs Ken Andres and Alex Ivanhenko. They bunked at a friendÆs house and attended his 7-year-old daughterÆs youth soccer game in the morning. Sure enough, the assigned refs didnÆt show up, so the youngsters got to play under the watch of what may have been the most experienced refereeing crew ever to officiate a U-8 game.
''After the game, a women comes up to Vinnie and starts giving it to him,'' Andres says. ''She tells him, 'I donÆt know where you got your referee license but you sure arenÆt qualified to referee!'''
For Andres, the story demonstrates one of the main sources of todayÆs referee shortage, which he predicts will become severe in the near future. If one of the United StatesÆ top referees gets berated at an under-8 game, imagine what others go through.
Youth soccer stocks its referee corps with officials in their teens. Andres believes that these young referees have to put up with so much abuse from raging parents on the sidelines they donÆt consider carrying a whistle later in life.
''I have refereed 7- and 8-year-old players who were saying they wished mom or dad didnÆt go to their games,'' says Andres, the president of the National Intercollegiate Soccer Officials Association (NISOA). ''Youth soccer is supposed to be fun, but instead of it being a great time for the children, parents turn it into another trying social experience that the kids shouldnÆt have to go through. When I was a kid, soccer was a sanctuary where the world stopped for us, but parents are ruining that and a lot of players who referee youth soccer decide they donÆt want to put up with it.''
That shrinks the pool of potential referees at a time when thereÆs a huge demand.
''We do not have enough referees,'' Andres says. ''ItÆs a big problem. Participation numbers are up, thereÆs been the explosion in the number of womenÆs programs. More games, fewer referees is a prescription for disaster and not too far down the road we will have a dire shortage.''
But Andres, who has refereed college soccer for 28 years and has officiated more than 50 collegiate final-four games, makes the case that referees encounter less grief in the college game than at the youth soccer level.''
ThereÆs a lot you donÆt have to put up with at the college level,'' says Andres. ''There is institutional control and conference control.''
He believes the best candidates to ref college soccer, those he has been reaching out to, are former college players like himself.
They, he believes, are in position to understand the mindset of the college player and cope with the high-paced style of college soccer. His aim is to convince them how rewarding refereeing college ball can be.
Andres, 51, grew up in the soccer hotbed of Trenton, N.J., and in 1974 captained Swarthmore College when it reached the NCAA Division III final. He is the first person to have played and refereed in a national college final. Upon entering Ohio State law school, he figured that the only way he could stay involved in college soccer while practicing law was to referee.
''I simply loved college soccer,'' he said. ''I believe in the notion of the student-athlete. I also know that soccer opened a lot of doors for me, and I wanted to give back. As a result, IÆve gotten a great deal of enjoyment.''