Prep sports have become dangerously toxic toward officials

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Jayden O’Hagan, 21, sits in a locker room moments after refereeing a high school basketball game.
It was an evening filled with unruly coaches and spectators. Technical fouls and ejection’s served as the evening’s main course of a dinner gone terribly wrong.
O’Hagan was in the middle of his sixth season in following his father’s footsteps as a high school referee. But that evening was the one where he reached his breaking point.
O’Hagan’s sixth season rocking a black and white striped shirt was his last.
“They don’t see me as a human,” O’Hagan said. “They see me as a referee who they can blame for all the problems.”
He’s one of many high school referees to hang up their whistles over the last decade, a 10-year stretch where 28% of Michigan High School Athletic Associations’s registered referees called it quits.
But what led to O’Hagan reaching this moment in the first place?
Man, you sure do love your whistle. Don’t you?
When O’Hagan moved up from elementary school to middle and high school contests, he knew the pressure would be increased. His first few seasons at the new age level revealed an expected higher degree of competition and intensity.
But the 2022-23 season proved to be too much for O’Hagan. In his first game of the season, he found himself threatening to throw a spectator out of the game because of the slanderous statements made about the officiating crew.
Toward the end of the third quarter, O’Hagan called a foul before the buzzer sounded. A parent, who swore at O’Hagan’s partner previously, took exception to the call.
In a dead-silent gym, the parent screams “well, you missed the travel that was right before the foul.”
The coach of the parent’s son responded, saying “there was a clear foul right before the travel before the buzzer went off. He made the right call.”
This event occurred in a seventh-grade boys basketball game.
“That kind of thing happens on the regular so often. It’s embarrassing,” O’Hagan said. “It’s embarrassing that these parents are that immature. That they can’t even allow their kids to just enjoy the game. It’s really frustrating.”
A few weeks later, O’Hagan found himself officiating a varsity boys basketball game.
O’Hagan handed one of the coaches a technical foul earlier in the game, relegating him to a chair on the bench. After the coach received his second technical foul from another referee, which resulted in the coach’s ejection from the game, O’Hagan stood on the other end of the floor with the ball. In that moment, he had two separate conversations with spectators.
There was one gentleman who understood the gravity of the situation. He showers O’Hagan with praise toward his maturity for his age.
Then there was a second gentleman sitting a row back. O’Hagan recognized him as someone who was chirping at him all night, but only when his back was turned. He heard the spectator’s voice exclaim words like “bulls—,” “terrible call” and “you think you’re all that.”
O’Hagan heard enough.
“I stop, I turn around and I look at him and I said ‘you know, you always have something to say when my back is turned to you. But when I look you in the eyes, you have absolutely nothing to say. Why is that?” O’Hagan said. “If you’ve got something to say say it to my face.”
The spectator continued to chirp. A minute later, O’Hagan ejected the spectator.
As the spectator made his way to half-court with an athletic director’s escort, he let out one last chirp: “Man, you sure do love your whistle. Don’t you?”
“It’s stuff like that that is so unnecessary. But we deal with it every single night,” O’Hagan said. “Why in the hell would I ever want to go and do my job at a place where I am getting absolutely hated on for strictly putting on a black and white striped shirt and making the game fair?”
As the final buzzer sounded, O’Hagan and the rest of the crew make their way to the locker room. In front of referee’s who he never worked with or even knew existed until that night, he broke down. He lost his cool.
He reached his breaking point. Emotions poured out like an erupting volcano.
“I’ve never felt more hated in my life,” O’Hagan said. “I won’t lie to anybody, I am a sensitive person. The things that I hear and the things that people say … I take very seriously and I take it to heart. The things that people say have been been rough this year especially. I realized that even though the money is as great as it is, it’s just not worth it right now to me.”
O’Hagan tries his best to brush things off, but he hears everything that comes from the stands whether spectators know it or not. It’s led to him breaking down and losing his cool more times than he cares to admit this last season alone.
“It’s really bad for your mental health if you’re a young official,” O’Hagan admitted. “I think that’s the biggest thing that these parents and coaches don’t understand. They think that they’re above the officials, and they don’t have any respect for the officials because the officials are just trying to keep the game fair. They’re not. It’s not one team or the other in a sense. We’re just trying to keep it fair.
“They hate us for what we do, and it’s strictly just because of what we do.”
Provided photo/Michigan High School Athletic Association
I’m going to take care of you in the parking lot
For nearly her entire life, Frankfort interim athletic director Karen Leinaar has played a role in prep sports in some sort of capacity. Whether it’s as an athlete, coach, official or administrator, she’s seen it all.
When tasked with handling obnoxiously unruly spectators, Leninaar used to keep a stack of official registration forms at the scorer’s table. She would approach the spectator in question, hand them the application, have the spectator fill it out and give it back to Leinaar, who gladly paid the spectator’s registration fee.
While she no longer keeps applications at scorer’s tables, spectators who step out of line receive the same ultimatum. Spectators have two choices: either put on the striped shirt, or sit down and be quiet.
Rules like a three-second violation and over the back have evolved and differ from the professional and collegiate level. In Leinaar’s eyes, some spectators don’t differentiate the rules from the age level.
“Eyes in the bleachers are a whole lot different than on the floor. Officials have to make split-second decisions whether we like them or not,” she said. “That’s been our biggest problem. Folks in the bleachers think they have a better seat than the guy or gal on the floor wearing the stripes. That’s where we’re losing people.
“Who wants to get yelled at? I don’t care how much money you pay; we’re not getting our young people, and when I say young people (I mean) under the age of 60, that want to be yelled at constantly while they’re doing a job.”
She found herself dealing with this type of fan as recently as Frankfort boys basketball’s run to state semifinals. When she approached the spectators and called them out for their behavior, the response from the spectators was “I paid my money to get in.”
Leinaar didn’t care. Paying for admission to a high school sporting event doesn’t automatically give that person a right to verbally assault another human being.
She compared those situations to a patron yelling at a grocery store clerk because they didn’t like the price of milk. It’s not acceptable in that scenario, and it’s not acceptable for a patron to yell at a referee solely because they bought a ticket to a high school sporting event.
“They’re no different than the person sitting in the bleachers other than the fact that they’ve had training,” she said. “It’s probably not their first game in March, and they’re doing the best job they can. They’re not choosing one team over another as many people have accused them. ‘Well, they like them better than us.’ No, they really don’t.
“They’re there trying to adhere to the rules to make sure that both teams play by the same fair rules as anybody else.”
McLain Moberg/News Advocate
Leinaar got a taste of that one evening.
During a high school basketball game, one spectator from the opposing team loudly disagreed with a call by a referee. His verbal jab was 13 words that raised a red flag larger than the state of Alaska.
“You’re terrible. I’m going to take care of you in the parking lot.”
“In today’s world you don’t know what that means,” Leinaar explained. “Potentially, is there a gun in the parking lot? Is this person just gonna rough them up? Are they gonna have an honest conversation? What’s it going to be?
“We didn’t know this person. We had no idea how this person was truly going to react in the situation.”
Sure, saying you’ll “take care of someone in the parking lot” may be considered a joke. In the 1996 film “Happy Gilmore,” Mr. Larsen said something similar to Shooter McGavin during the Tour Championship.
But this wasn’t a scene from an Adam Sandler film. This was reality. Plus, Leinaar knew that the referee in question was a law enforcement officer who had his firearm placed carefully in his locker.
Leinaar immediately called the police. With five minutes remaining in the game, the unruly spectator was pulled out of the bleachers to discuss what transpired earlier. The spectator admitted to “just joking around” but Leinaar made it clear that he was in the wrong for threatening a referee.
Leinaar then pulled the referee in question to the conversation, introducing him by his day job title of a police officer. The spectator, in Leinaar’s words, was “mortified” and “immediately apologized up and down” to the referee.
The spectator’s wife then joined the conversation. She did not want to approach their son after the game out of fear of embarrassment.
Leinaar informed all parties that the spectator’s son had already apologized to the referees for his father’s behavior.
The next day, she received a phone call from the opposing school’s superintendent. He wanted to know what exactly transpired the previous evening. The superintendent also noted that the spectator was in the superintendent’s office that morning to apologize for embarrassing his son’s school and assumed Leinaar had already spilled the beans on what transpired the night before.
They shared a laugh, and he admitted to Leinaar that however she handled that situation, it worked.
“It’s hard to confront those situations. But oftentimes in a situation like that taking the step to prevent a potential issue outside works in an educational setting,” Leinaar said. “I would have never gone to the parking lot and confronted that gentleman. But he was inside ‘my space,’ so we were able to do it that way. And those are things that that you have to learn. Sometimes those kind of confrontations are better off in your space than somebody else’s.
“But you never know, and that’s scary. That’s really scary.”
It’s encounters with parents similar to what Leinaar endured that night that drove O’Hagan out of officiating.
“Parents, the last two years especially, have been ruthless,” O’Hagan said. “They don’t care. They all complain about having older officials and never seeing any new young guys. But then when they do get the young guys that are like me, that actually want to take it serious that want to advance their career in it if they can… They see me and then that’s their excuse to cry about it during the entire game. That’s their excuse to yell at the officials; to give them a reason to have to make them better than us, in a sense. It’s really hard.