Protecting Children on the Ice: Referees and Responsibility
I love ice hockey. It killed me, is killing me. My brain, like the surface of the moon, cratered from years of collisions with the boards, sticks, elbows, ice. Isolated, distant, circling the inhabited world, still trying to communicate with it. Pills for ungovernable rage, pills for depression, pills for migraines. Chunks of me gone, unrecognizable to my wife and child, myself. Words gone, memories gone. And still loving hockey–the speed and grace and skill, the team, the exhilaration. The illusion of invulnerability.
I started playing hockey when I was 6 years old. I played in school and college, then in some semi-pro and adult leagues. I worked with the 1998 USA gold medal Olympic women’s team, was director of the USA National Women’s Hockey Festival in Lake Placid, head coach of women’s hockey at Boston College and coach of youth hockey for many years starting when my son was 3. Thirteen concussions later, now in my 60s, the time bomb of traumatic brain injury finally detonating, I struggle to organize my thoughts, control my anger and find the words that I want to use in my final effort to rescue hockey from the violence and damage that threaten our children and that threaten hockey itself.
The past five years have brought about a dramatic increase in awareness of the dangers of concussions, as well as a desire to make youth sports, including youth hockey, safe. USA Hockey (USAH), the governing body for American youth hockey, has been aggressive in its efforts to reduce the incidence of concussions in youth hockey, both through education and rule changes. Rule changes recently passed include eliminating checking from the Peewee level, making all contact (even unintentional contact) to the head a penalty and reducing avoidable body checks to a player who is no longer in possession of the puck.
However, two critical questions remain: Will these efforts have the desired effect of preventing concussions? And who is or should be most responsible for making sure that they do?
Injuries in youth hockey are an unfortunate and occasionally unavoidable part of the game. Some injuries result from uncontrollable accidents, a skate edge catching in the ice, a stumble and brush with another player. It seems unlikely that any set of rule changes will eliminate these completely. Still, parents and players can hope that recent rule changes will minimize the incidence of injuries caused by reckless, dangerous, or illegal play. They have a right to expect that coaches will teach players what the rules are and how to compete within them. And they have a right to expect that referees will enforce not just the letter but the spirit of those rules to protect the players.
The rule changes have one overriding goal: to decrease the number of situations in which games get “out of control” because of escalating cycles of violent and dangerous play. My informal study of a Peewee and Bantam team in the Greater Boston Youth Hockey League (GBYHL) found that, in a three-year period (2010-2013), all concussions (17 of 17) occurred in games, as opposed to practice, and the majority (15 of 17) occurred in the third period, as opposed to earlier in the game. Concussions were also much more common in games that coaches and spectators identified as “excessively violent.”
Clearly, something can happen late in games that causes play to become more violent and more dangerous. Anyone who has played contact sports understands this phenomenon and the psychology behind it. Frustration builds as games progress, especially if players feel that refs are ignoring repeated illegal hits and fouls. Retaliation becomes inevitable and increasingly violent at exactly the same time that players become more tired and vulnerable to injury.
Who is responsible?
Preventing this cycle of escalating violence that can occur in some hockey games is essential if the new rules aimed at preventing serious head injuries are going to have the desired effect. Although all participants in youth hockey (players, coaches, referees, administrators and even parents) must accept some responsibility for making games safer, ultimate responsibility for control of games rests with the specific officials on the ice during actual play: the referees.
Parents can do their best at home to emphasize fair play, and they can control their own behavior at games, but their sphere of influence is limited. Players must control their own behavior but have minimal control over the behavior of the other players on the ice. Similarly, coaches must influence the behavior of their players through education and discipline, but they are generally limited in their ability to control the behavior of opposing coaches and players. And none of these participants has any authority over the referees.
Referees, on the other hand, run the show. They manage all of the participants and all of the action on the ice. And they are the only stake-holders who have the power to exercise this authority. According to Rule 502 (a) of the USAH rule book, “The referee shall have general supervision of the game and his decision shall be final in all matters occurring before, during or after the game. The role of the official is to enforce the rules of the game and in doing so shall have full authority over all participants.” The USAH rule book also says, “Each official should enforce all playing rules fairly and respectfully with the safety of the players and the best interest of the game in mind. Players must be held accountable for dangerous and illegal actions with the proper enforcement of the rules at all times.”
The mandate for refs couldn’t be clearer, and to enable them to keep the games safe, the rule book gives referees an array of tools: various levels of penalties, ejections, and suspensions with which to punish dangerous play. They have the authority and responsibility to influence a game by calling these penalties, setting a proper tone, and, ultimately, if dangerous play can’t be controlled, stopping a game before catastrophic injuries occur. Yet the culture of youth hockey allows referees to shirk their responsibility. For several years, I conducted an informal study of this culture. The purpose of my study was to examine referees, coaches, and media coverage for their attitudes about the responsibility of youth hockey referees to maintain control and maximize player safety in youth hockey.
Attitudes about responsibility
I conducted the survey from 2010 through 2013 while coaching a Greater Boston Youth Hockey League peewee/bantam team. From week to week, month to month, during practices and games, I interviewed 21 coaches and 19 referees, many of them several times. I had the chance to observe the behavior of these coaches and refs during 121 games. The survey explored coaches’ and referees’ attitudes regarding contact to the head, concussions, game violence and responsibility for controlling game violence. I interviewed the referees and some of the coaches personally, and some of the coaches completed the survey online. Each survey included the question, “Who do you think is most responsible for controlling unnecessary violence in youth hockey games?”
Among the 21 coaches interviewed, 9 coaches said “referees,” 5 coaches said “players,” and 7 coaches said “coaches.” On the other hand, all 19 referees interviewed said “coaches.” None of the 19 referees interviewed said referees were most responsible for limiting unnecessary violence. In addition, only 2 of 19 referees interviewed agreed with the statement that “referees have a responsibility to control the violence in a game situation beyond the strict written rules.” The refs voiced a fairly unified attitude: “It’s not our job to control anything. We see a penalty and we call it. It’s the coaches’ job to control their players. We call the book. That’s it.” Evidently, rule 502 is irrelevant to “the book.”
The second component of this study was a review of media attitudes as reflected in articles available in Douglas Abram’s “Today’s Articles.” Abram has been compiling a daily list of articles from newspapers and magazines, medical reports and research papers dealing with sports and society since 2001. My study reviewed all of approximately 3000 articles from 2009 to 2013 to identify those that related specifically to concussions, injury, and violence in youth sports and that discussed player, coach, and referee responsibility for controlling violence and injury.
Of the relevant 328 articles, 103 described the behavior of coaches, players, spectators, and administrators. The behaviors documented in these articles were overwhelmingly negative, with few instances of positive behavior documented. Of those 103 articles, 65 focused on the role of coaches, 18 focused on the role of players, 20 focused on the role of spectators, and 6 focused on the role of administrators. Only 4 of the 65 articles regarding behavior of coaches were positive. The remaining 61, as well as all of the articles about players and spectators, were critical of the coaches’ behavior and/or suggested that the coaches needed to do more to control their players and support the referees.
In contrast to this negative portrayal of coaches, players, spectators, and administrators, the treatment of referees and their performance was much more limited, was much less critical, and contained minimal references to referees and their failure to maintain control of games. Referee performance was specifically discussed in only 19 of the 328 articles. Seventeen of the 19 articles focused solely on the difficulty of refereeing and suggested that referees need to be treated with greater respect. Only 2 of the 19 articles focused on the need for referees to call more consistent and stricter games in order to minimize the risk of injury. One of these was an article by Doug Abrams describing an excessively violent game that resulted in the paralysis of a high school player.
Abrams presented this game as an embodied of all that can and does go wrong on the ice. It was a game played on November 3, 1999, between New Trier High School and Glenbrook North High School, at the Rinkside Sports Ice Arena in the Chicago suburb of Gurnee. Abrams commented that it was a “tragic game” that was “out of control from the opening faceoff” with players and fans taunting each other and engaging in numerous confrontations. Abrams makes a long and commendable plea for greater civility and respect for the game and for player safety. Even in this article, however, the criticism of referees was relatively muted. Abrams laments that as the game “spiraled out of control for an hour or more, no coach, referee, league administrator or parent had the common sense to stop the game, deliver a public address announcement requesting respect for the rules, or otherwise move the teams from the brink before it was too late.” Beyond this general indictment of everyone, there is no special blame for the referees and no mention that the referees were the ones with the ultimate responsibility for controlling this game and with the unique prerogative to terminate the game.
At the final buzzer ending the mayhem or within a couple of seconds afterwards, a 15-year-old Glenbrook North player unleashed the anger and frustration that had built from the moment the game started. He sped across the ice, blind-sided Neal Goss, the 15-year-old sophomore captain whose three goals had clinched the game, and drove him head-first into the boards. “That’s what you get for messing,” the player allegedly said as Goss lay on the ice, permanently paralyzed from the neck down.
Although the USA Hockey rulebook gives youth hockey referees the ultimate control over a game, the results of my study indicated a general tendency of referees, coaches, and media commentators to underplay this responsibility. Referees were most extreme in their views, uniformly identifying coaches, not referees, as the ones most responsible for controlling the level of violence in hockey games. This attitude echoes the results of a larger Canadian referee survey, “Violence in Canadian Amateur Hockey,” written by Alun Ackery, Charles Tator and Carolyn Snider. In this larger study, 63% of the 632 referees surveyed said coaches “are the most important individuals for determining player safety.”
The challenges of refereeing
The reasons that youth hockey referees might fail to understand or accept their responsibility or act in ways that fail to ensure player safety are complicated and probably multifaceted. Unfortunately, some referees seem not to share a commitment to player safety. They offer various excuses: “I cannot call all of the penalties because we’d never get out of the first period”; “I won’t call contact-to-the-head penalties if they are unintentional because I don’t agree with the way the rules have been rewritten.” Neither attitude is conducive to maintaining control of games or maximizing player safety.
Others point to the sheer difficulty of refereeing some hockey games. They have a point. It’s not difficult to sympathize with the challenges they face. Younger refs are less experienced. Older referees, especially as the speed of players has increased, sometimes cannot skate fast enough to cover the ice when there is only one referee and one linesman assigned to the game. They sometimes have to officiate three games in a row on the same day and can miss many infractions because they are tired and cannot get to the correct position to make a call. Sometimes, they concentrate solely on the puck and miss what happens the moment after a play when the puck moves to another part of the ice. The ref’s eyes follow the puck and miss the illegal hit on the player who just passed the puck. These moments frequently offer the most dangerous opportunities for frustrated players to slam an opponent into the boards.
On-ice officials are especially sensitive about interfering with the flow of games or the competitive nature of games or the outcome of games. They know how angry and aggressive coaches and parents can become when they perceive what they call referee interference: “Dammit, ref, just let them play.” As a result, referees often feel emotionally intimidated, and many suffer actual verbal or physical abuse. According to the Canadian referee study, more than 90% of the 632 referees said that they had been the objects of such abuse. In addition, 55% of referees said that the aggressive behavior directed against them resulted in their losing control of the game, and 71% believe that verbal or physical abuse of referees by coaches, fans, and parents results in an increased risk of injury to players. Faced with these potentially intimidating game situations, it is not hard to imagine some youth hockey referees being unable or unwilling to exert control of the game. This reaction is particularly true for many young, less experienced referees who work in youth hockey. Referees in college and professional hockey are more trained, experienced and confident.
While the challenges that referees face may be understandable, missing or failing to call a violence penalty (hit to the head, hit from behind, roughing, boarding, and charging) in the early stages of a game can have serious repercussions by the end of that game. And everyone knows it. During the telecast of the first period of the US-Canada Women’s Olympic hockey game on February 12, 2014, in Sochi, Pierre McGuire, game commentator and winner of the 2013 Sports Emmy for outstanding sports reporting, made the comment on a missed call by the referee: “That sends a message to both benches when they let that check go. They [the players] now know they have a little leeway to play more physical.”
The problems are compounded by the fact that youth hockey referees tend to be less well supervised than are referees in college and pro leagues. College and pro leagues typically allocate substantial resources to referee training and oversight. It is common for every college and pro game to be videotaped and reviewed by experienced referee supervisors. Every college and pro referee is, typically, graded, as much for educational purposes as to discipline the ones who are not performing. Every play is videotaped from multiple angles. The oversight of referees in youth hockey is much less formal and often non-existent.
All college and pro coaches know that, if they have a problem with any particular referee, the head of referees for the league is a phone call away. Unfortunately, youth hockey league officials rarely have the resources or time to respond to calls, so it’s not surprising that coaches are not encouraged to make their feelings known. In the GBYHL’s own rule book, an addendum under Playing Rules reads, “Appeals for rules infractions, inquiries and or suspensions are not encouraged.” As a consequence, oversight of youth hockey referees in leagues such as the GBYHL can be highly variable and sometimes absent. For instance, none of the coaches or referees surveyed in the GBYHL had ever seen the Supervisor of Officials at a game. When the league president was asked whether his supervisor did, in fact, attend games to make sure that his officials are doing a proper job, he responded that the supervisor was “too busy.” When the suggestion was made to create a system that allowed coaches to provide comments about referees so that the supervisor would at least have some insight into games he had not attended, the president responded that the league had no interest in disciplining its referees because it was “hard enough to find referees as it is” and that the league “did not have the time for this, anyway.”
And while it may be true that the two well-meaning administrators in the GBYHL were legitimately “too busy” to attend games or bother with a system of feedback that encouraged referees to take control of games, the young players remain vulnerable to crippling injuries. Who is going to protect them? If the referees don’t want the responsibility, if they reject the notion that they have a responsibility and are unwilling to hold themselves accountable, and if the league administrators are not willing to hold them accountable, who’s left?
Strategies
Perhaps journalists and commentators need to get involved. Reporting instances when referees fail to maintain control might pressure league officials and stir parents and fans to speak up. This strategy worked effectively in professional football to help end the referee strike of 2012. During the strike when less experienced substitute referees were used, reporters and commentators constantly talked about player safety. An editorial in the Record-Journal (Meriden, CT) argued, “The NFL is permitting . . . unprepared amateurs to oversee a hyper-aggressive sport in which poor officiating allows play to become increasingly violent. Substitute referees seem confused about technicalities regarding what is and isn’t unnecessary force. Ultra-competitive players have caught on and taken advantage. Aggression is markedly up [and] on-field fighting seems more prevalent, as players know the refs cannot maintain control.” This sort of media coverage resulted in arousing fans and pressuring referees and the NFL to end the strike.
The same strategy might work in youth hockey. Greater emphasis in articles and more published research on the frequency of concussions and on the actual game conditions that cause them could increase public pressure on youth hockey referees and administrators to exert more control of games in order to improved player safety.
The problem of player safety is real. The New York Times reported in 2010 that among the 9000 11- and 12-year-olds playing hockey in Alberta, Canada, roughly 700 concussions are reported each year. Because the issue has been getting increased attention, more people are willing to report concussions, and by some estimates the number has been rising at an annual rate of 15%. Researchers at the University of Calgary who followed 11- and 12-year-olds in Peewee hockey found that serious injuries, including concussions that prevented return to the team for at least ten days, were three times as likely to occur in games when body-checking was allowed than when it was not. And researchers have firmly established the connection between repeated childhood brain trauma and later emotional and cognitive impairment.
Minimizing the risk of injuries in youth hockey will take a concerted effort by all involved. Ideally, players and coaches are getting the message and will act in ways that do not unnecessarily endanger their safety or the safety of their teammates and opponents. When they deviate from this goal, however, it is up to referees to hold them accountable. It is also up to league administrators and society in general (especially those who write articles on the subject) to hold referees accountable when they don’t maintain control of games. Referees should not enjoy any special immunity from criticism. No one doubts that youth hockey referees can find themselves in situations that are difficult to control or that they need respect and support during games in order to create a safe environment. Ultimately, however, referees must accept their responsibility for controlling the game: they stand as the last line of defense against injury. Regardless of how difficult the situation may be, regardless of whether irresponsible coaches and parents are shouting insults, referees have a job to do, and they need to do it. And when they don’t, they need to be held accountable by everyone.
Of course, many referees do their job and are good at it. Legendary Bill Cleary, former gold medalist and long-time Harvard hockey coach and athletic director, understood the job and the importance of accepting ultimate responsibility for the game. In the 1960s, he refereed youth and high school hockey games: “I’d run into a game here or there where the emotions got high and the rough stuff started to get going. . . You betcha that I’d do something about it. I didn’t wait until there was some dangerous stuff going on or an injury. You’ve got to have a sense about these things. When I saw a kid get heated up and start banging some kid, first I’d take him aside and say, ‘Son, that’s not to happen on this ice anymore. Next time you get out of control, you’re out of here.’ If that didn’t calm things down, I’d go to each coach and point my finger in his face and tell them, ’You shut this cheap stuff down now, or I’m ending this game right here and now! You got that?’ And you know something? That did the trick every time.”
We need more refs like Bill. Although there certainly are some, youth hockey culture and the attitudes about the role of referees work against improving the situation. Leagues must make it clear that the prime directive is the safety of children, and they must insist that referees accept and exercise the authority invested in them.
We don’t need any more children being killed by hockey when they reach their 60s. It’s too late for me. It’s too late even for some who are playing now. It doesn’t need to be too late for those who play tomorrow.
Originally published by League of Fans (June 2014)
References:
USA Hockey 2011-2013 Official Rules of Ice Hockey
Abrams, Douglas E., Today’s Articles, 2009-2013
Abrams, Douglas E., “All Safety is Local (Part 1),” Ask Coach Wolff, March 22, 2012
Alun Ackery, Charles Tator and Carolyn Snider, “Violence in Canadian Amateur Hockey: The Experience of Referees in Ontario,” Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine, 2012.
Greater Boston Youth Hockey League: Rules and Regulations
Interview with President of Greater Boston Youth Hockey League, August 2012
“The Umpire Strikes Back,” Record-Journal (Meriden, Connecticut), Editorial, Sept 2012.
Klein, Jeff Z., “With Focus on Youth Safety, A Sport Considers Changes,” New York Times, Oct. 2010.