The Answer to the Officiating Shortage Just Played Its Last Game
Think about the best athlete you ever played with. Now think about who got them there. Not the college coach or the trainer. The Little League coach who stayed late. The umpire behind the plate on a Tuesday night in May, working his third game of the week for not much money. Nobody becomes who they became without those people.
Some former athletes go on to coach at the top. Deion Sanders coached high school football in Texas before Jackson State and Colorado. Tom Izzo's first head coaching job after playing at Northern Michigan was one season at Ishpeming High School. Dawn Staley took the Temple job while she was still playing in the WNBA. Not everyone is going to be them. But the game doesn't need everyone to be them. It needs a lot of people to be the Little League coach and the umpire behind the plate.
Right now, we're not asking. We spend years pushing athletes toward careers off the field, and we never tell them the game needs them back. That's the real shortage.
The numbers, straight
Participation is booming. A record 8,415,684 students played high school sports in 2025-26, according to the NFHS. Every one of those games needs officials, and most of those kids started out with volunteer coaches.
The officiating headcount is actually recovering. That's the good news, and I want to be honest about it. The NFHS reports that registrations in the 36 states it tracks reached 237,811 in 2024-25, up 8% from before the pandemic, after an estimated loss of 50,000 officials during COVID.
But look at who's doing the work. In the 2023 National Officiating Survey, the largest ever with 35,813 officials responding, the average age was 56.68, up from 53.29 in 2017. For the first time, the average climbed over 50 in every sport. And 79% said they had taken more assignments because of the shortage. That isn't a healthy workforce. It's a veteran crew covering for a generation nobody asked.
Coaching looks the same. The number of youth coaches has grown, but according to the Aspen Institute, 40% of youth head coaches in 2023 were 55 or older, up from about 14% to 20% for most of the previous decade. And 80% of coaches say their community needs more coaches.
A shortage is a headcount problem. What we have is a pipeline problem. We keep refilling the bucket with the same people and hoping it holds.
Where the pipeline breaks
Here's the leak. Almost every kid who plays stops playing. The NCAA estimates that of the more than eight million students playing high school sports, about 550,000 will compete at an NCAA school. In football and basketball, about 1% of college players get drafted.
And we don't prepare them for that. In the NCAA's 2026 career planning report, 57% of athletes in Division I men's sports said going pro or making an Olympic team was at least somewhat likely. So the message they grow up with is: make it, or move on. When the career ends, they get pointed at a job, an internship, a LinkedIn profile. Nobody says: you know this game better than almost anyone alive, and it needs you.
There's a story underneath that, too. Somewhere along the way, coaching and officiating started to look like what you do if you didn't make it. The has-been with the whistle. That story is backwards. Brad Stevens quit a job at Eli Lilly to volunteer in Butler's basketball office. He didn't fall into coaching. He walked away from a career to get back to the game.
The people who stay already told us why
We don't have to guess what brings people in. In the Aspen Institute's National Coach Survey of more than 10,000 youth coaches, 79% said wanting to stay involved in sport was a big reason they started, and 78% pointed to playing sports as a kid. Only 14% said money. And 48% said they started because someone asked them.
Read that again. Nearly half of youth coaches are coaching because somebody asked. The easiest recruiting tool we have is the one we almost never use on the people most qualified to say yes.
Officials tell a similar story. Hancock and colleagues surveyed 514 officials and found they started for intrinsic reasons and "for the sport." They stayed for intrinsic and social reasons. They quit over lack of respect, too much stress and lack of recognition. When Stacy Warner and colleagues interviewed referees who quit, the reasons included problematic social interactions, poor training and mentoring, and a "Lack of Referee Community." They found that off-court factors mattered more than what happened on the court.
Think about what that means. Officials stay when they have a crew. They leave when they're alone. Former athletes just lost a team and are looking for one. The fit is almost too obvious.
The people who run officiating already see it. Debbie Williamson, who has coordinated women's basketball officials for several NCAA Division I conferences, started Player-to-Ref camps to move former college players into officiating. Her reasoning: "They have a great feel for the game. They know the game in a way that someone who has never played doesn't." In 2025, NASO and the Division III Commissioners Association launched Stay In the Game, which pairs athletes with officiating mentors "as athletes' playing days start to wind down." That's the right idea. It should be the norm, not a pilot.
Why it matters for kids
This isn't just about keeping games on the schedule. Coaches decide whether kids come back. In a classic youth baseball study, 26% of kids whose coaches weren't trained dropped out the next season, compared with 5% of kids whose coaches were. In Aspen's 2026 national survey of youth, "bad coaching" was the top complaint among current players, and one of the top two among kids who quit.
Put a former college athlete in front of a team of ten-year-olds and you get someone who knows the game, knows what good coaching felt like and knows what bad coaching cost them. That's who we should want on the field.
The sport needs them as much as they need it
I've written before about what former athletes lose when they walk away: the team, the identity, the reason to show up. The research on leaving sport and on changing your role in it says the same thing. Groups protect you. Giving back helps you.
This is the other side of that deal. The sport needs its former athletes to survive, just as much as the athletes need the sport. Every official working their third game of the week and every volunteer coach who quit after one season is a sign we've been ignoring the most qualified people we have.
How to fix the pipeline
None of this is expensive. It's mostly about asking at the right time.
Ask during the final season. Every senior athlete should be asked, before their last game, to coach or officiate one youth game. Not after the banquet. Before.
Recruit crews, not individuals. Officials quit when they're alone. Bring former teammates in together, pair them with a mentor and give them a crew from day one.
Change the story. Coaching and officiating aren't what you do if you didn't make it. The best players you've ever seen made it because somebody coached them and somebody officiated their games. Athletic departments, state associations and coaches should say that out loud.
Make it a real path. Colleges already run career programs. Add officiating certification, youth coaching courses and an introduction to local associations to the same menu.
Where we fit
This is why Next Game at The NOVA Foundation exists. We connect former athletes of any age with opportunities to coach, officiate, play and hang out in their city. Volunteers join through each partner organization's own volunteer and safeguarding process, and the social side comes naturally after the games.
If you're a former athlete, join the Next Game community. If you run a league, a youth program or an officials' association and need people who know the game, email us at partner@thenovafoundation.org.
Sources
Anderson-Butcher, D., & Bates, S. (2022). National Coach Survey: Final report. Aspen Institute. https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/11.14.22-Anderson-Butcher-Bates.-2022.-National-Coach-Survey-Final-Report_.pdf
Aspen Institute Project Play. (2024). State of Play 2024: Coaching trends. https://projectplay.org/state-of-play-2024-coaching-trends
Aspen Institute Project Play. (2026). Aspen Institute National Survey of Youth and Sports: 15 key findings. https://projectplay.org/news/aspen-institute-national-survey-of-youth-and-sports-15-key-findings
Barnett, N. P., Smoll, F. L., & Smith, R. E. (1992). Effects of enhancing coach-athlete relationships on youth sport attrition. The Sport Psychologist, 6(2), 111-127. https://doi.org/10.1123/tsp.6.2.111
Hancock, D. J., Dawson, D. J., & Auger, D. (2015). Why ref? Understanding sport officials' motivations to begin, continue, and quit. Movement & Sport Sciences, 87, 31-39. https://doi.org/10.1051/sm/2014018
NASO. (2025). DIII & NASO launch new "Stay In the Game" officiating recruitment program aimed at student-athletes. https://www.naso.org/stay-in-the-game/
NCAA. (2026). NCAA GOALS study: Student-athlete career planning and development. https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/research/goals/2026RES_GOALS-CareerPlanningReport.pdf
NCAA. (n.d.). Probability of competing beyond high school. https://www.ncaa.org/sports/2013/12/17/probability-of-competing-beyond-high-school.aspx
NFHS / Referee Magazine. (2023). NASO survey indicates concerns with sportsmanship, shortage of officials. https://www.nfhs.org/stories/naso-survey-indicates-concerns-with-sportsmanship-shortage-of-officials
NFHS. (2026). Led by girls flag football and girls wrestling, high school sports participation increases for fifth consecutive year. https://nfhs.org/stories/led-by-girls-flag-football-and-girls-wrestling-high-school-sports-participation-increases-for-fifth-consecutive-year
Tittrington, S. (2021). Transition game. Referee. https://www.referee.com/transition-game/
Vance, M. (2025, July 24). Officiating numbers are on the rise. Lake Oswego Review. https://lakeoswegoreview.com/2025/07/24/lor-officials/ (quoting NFHS 2024-25 officials registration data)
Warner, S., Tingle, J. K., & Kellett, P. (2013). Officiating attrition: The experiences of former referees via a sport development lens. Journal of Sport Management, 27(4), 316-328. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsm.27.4.316
