Friday, September 14, 2007
Women Officiating in Sports
Women have been making great strides in sports as of late. For instance, the final game of the WNBA is coming up and expected to have the highest ratings its had in many years. Also, the Women's World Cup is currently going on and receiving great publicity as ESPN and ESPN 2 are airing them at the moment. But tommorrow, Women in Sports will make a huge advancement as there will be a woman official will be officiating of college football game. http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=3019618. Her name is Sarah Thomas and she will be the first woman in college football history to officiate a game when she covers the Memphis-Jacksonville State of Alabama game. The question I have is, why aren't women officials more common in professional and intercollegiate sports? Most will say because they don't know as much as men or aren't trained well enough or have enough experience to do so. I think that is a little unfair seeing as their are classes that you can take to become professionally trained to be an official. The first NBA women official didn't come until the late 1990's and she really only got the job since she worked her way up in the WNBA as an official and was the 1997 WNBA Official of the Year. http://www.womenof.com/Articles/sp071297.asp I think they can do as good as a job if not better than males at officiating but due to society and other factors of the world, I don't ever see women becoming equals in the officiating world. In fact, I'd be very surprised to see them make up 25% of officials in any sport seeing how the MLB or NFL does not even have one female yet. But I could see why not for the NFL since that is a very physical sport and sometimes the Ref's have to break up fights.
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I agree with your blog completely. Women officials should have the same chance to officiate as men do. During my junior year in high school I took up the job as an umpire for baseball games, and in order to become an umpire you had to take classes and pass a test at the end of your classes. This is a fair system that I am sure is used for major league officials. Girls and Guys both have the same skill as officials if they all take the classes so there is no reason women shouldn’t be officials. Also when I was younger the women officials in my class who passed took umpiring a lot more serious then the men did and actually were all around better umpires at games. I think college football is a great place to start for women officials because if a woman can make it in an intense fighting, trash talking game then women can handle any major league sport as an official.
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