by Lis Ray
After the 2023 Super Bowl, many Ouray students groused that the referees gifted the Kansas City Chiefs another championship. “Holding?” they asked, incredulously. But this kind of complaint is not limited to professional sports.
Fans of Trojan basketball have a long tradition of griping about the refs. According to sophomore Jesus Sandoval, refs in this area give reputations to players and teams, and “they think our team is a bunch of complainers and whiners,” so they give us a lot of fouls.
One thing people do not know is that referees for our basketball games are determined weeks in advance. Mr Pearce does not pick out the referees. Mr. Pearce said the league “sets up the first part of the schedule which is from the first part of November to winter break.” He says that once the schedule is sent out for the season, the referees will see what fits their own schedules and then they will eventually get assigned to games. Mr. Pearce says that if conflicts come up, then someone in the town that has enough experience will possibly be given the opportunity to ref.
The players are familiar with most of the referees that are assigned to Ouray basketball games. Jesus is aware that half of the crowd will see their calls as bad and the other half good, and admits that some of the calls “have been in our favor.” But when things do not seem to be going in a good direction, Jesus said that “the refs just don't see it.”
Jesus remembers getting ejected from the game against Crested Butte. In his words, it “scarred him for life.” Before Jesus’s ejection, he had never even fouled out or even received a technical.
Freshman Brooke Edder believes that referees make “really bad calls, especially in high school.” She thinks that refereeing “seems kind of hard,” especially to determine whether or not something should be called or not. She mentioned that her older sister played basketball when she was in high school, and wondered if refs “expect me to play like my sister.” But by the end of the season, she said, “the refs just saw me as a regular basketball player.”
At any game, referees will face one happy and one angry crowd. Jesus mentioned that what he loves most about basketball is “the flow of the game,” and sometimes referees interfere with that. Jesus Sandoval knows that a bad call or game is not always the ref's fault, and that the opponent also plays a huge factor in whether or not the game will be played fairly or not.
He also knows that refs are just people and they are not perfect. Jesus admitted that when referees do not see something, they say “we did not see it.” With three refs on the court all Jesus wants, he said, is a ref that “is fair on both sides of the court.”