Post by FredFan7 on Nov 22, 2021 15:20:55 GMT -5
Behind a pay wall, so:
All-access with a MAC officiating crew: Inside college football’s most thankless job
By Nicole Auerbach 5h ago 16
MUNCIE, Ind. — The morning pregame meeting had gone later than usual, and that was after breakfast at the local diner had taken longer than usual. But Tim O’Dey was the head referee of Crew 6, and this was Crew 6’s last game together. So he was going to go as long as he wanted.
He had photos of the MAC officiating crew printed and framed so each member could take a keepsake with them when they left Scheumann Stadium last Wednesday night. And he had a whole speech prepared, to set the stage with kickoff for Ball State-Central Michigan about eight hours away.
O’Dey told his crew that they were among the best of the best, the 99th percentile. He had crunched the numbers and found there were fewer than 75 officiating crews assigned to work Football Bowl Subdivision games. The seven on-field officials and two replay officials in his audience made up one of them.
“We are all in pretty rare air here,” O’Dey said. “We all should take pride in what we have done with our careers because there are a lot of people who want to do what we get to do here tonight. But there is a reason that we’re here to do it. We have dedicated maybe more time than we should have toward this craft. We’ve spent a lot of time with the rulebook, a lot of time with one another, a lot of time figuring out what it takes to work football at this level.
“There are going to be thousands of people watching this game in bars across the country, and they’re going to think that they can do what we do out there — and they’re wrong. What we do is special. Don’t ever forget that.”
O’Dey is right. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people believe that they could do this job better than the men and women who do it. But what they don’t see when they yell at their screens or online is the amount of training, studying, film-watching and evaluation that goes into the profession. These officials all have so-called “real” jobs, too, often using vacation time and PTO to get to and from games, particularly those that fall in the middle of the week as Ball State-Central Michigan does.
Officiating is a largely thankless job, where your best days are marked by the fact that no one outside of your crew knows your name. You only receive public feedback when it’s criticism; just last week, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby reprimanded two Texas Tech broadcasters for naming and shaming each official working the Texas Tech-Iowa State game on air. The announcers were taken off the Red Raiders’ next broadcast. These jobs are challenging enough without someone inciting angry fans to track down individual officials in response to a series of subjective calls.
What those furious football fans in Big 12 country and elsewhere may not realize is how many tests officials have to pass to get and keep their jobs, and how frequently they’re evaluated. They won’t get promoted or work postseason games unless they routinely grade out well. They take a proctored exam each offseason. They finish each game physically and mentally exhausted, after weighing 10-12 decisions they have to make or not make on every play over a three-hour game. (O’Dey likens the feeling to taking a six-hour standardized test.)
And right after the game ends, they debrief in their locker room and work through the controversial calls, whatever coaches were upset about and everything they could have done better or more efficiently. Correct calls, no-calls, missed calls and operational mistakes all get their moment.
“People talk about how there’s no accountability in officiating, and that’s just not the truth,” O’Dey said. “There is more accountability on a more regular feedback basis than any job I’ve ever had — during the week (from officiating coordinators) and we get evaluated by the crowd on an instantaneous basis.
“If you screw up, you don’t have to wait for your six-month review to find out. You know right away.”
Adrenaline courses through the officials’ locker room in the minutes that follow the final whistle. Central Michigan beat Ball State 37-17 on a foggy, rainy night in which the weather had gotten worse as the evening went on. The officials peel off their many layers, water droplets flying, with a few people commenting that they lost feeling in their hands out there.
Like players and coaches, the officials are still wound up from three hours and seven minutes of being “on.” They dwell on what they could have done better and try to anticipate what’s coming when they get a copy of the game film. There will undoubtedly be a closer look at a rare penalty and a personal foul that possibly could have been avoided if an official had gotten between the players a little earlier. They’ll be graded individually on fouls called, no-calls and also their positioning on the field.
O’Dey will be asked to revisit the way in which he explained a touchdown that was confirmed by replay. He should have emphasized that the player maintained complete and continuous control of the ball as he went to the ground. It’s nitpicky, but it’s always better to overexplain than underexplain. That’s why referees are mic’d up to discuss the calls they make in the first place.
O’Dey has been working college football games for nearly two decades, first starting out working high school games in rural Nebraska back in 1997. His MAC crew is diverse in age, race and experience. The least experienced member is center judge Kyle Harbour, who is in his first year in the MAC and fifth overall in college football. John Swartz, the line judge, is about to finish up his ninth year in the MAC and 18th overall in college football. Nicole Randolph, who was filling in as the side judge for this particular game, was the lone woman on the crew.
Everyone who gets into officiating does so for the same core reason: They love the sport and want to be around it. They want to give back. Some tried to play or coach first, but that dream either ended or proved not to be sustainable. O’Dey knew he wanted to be an engineer but had long tossed around the idea of officiating high school football games on the side; one day, a guy he was playing basketball with suggested he attend a meeting. It all escalated from there — the high school games, all the clinics, his foray into NAIA and other small-college games. He has used countless days of PTO to make this work, and he’s missed his sons’ games and other family events to chase his passion.
Swartz, who works for the supermarket chain Wegmans, considers officiating not a job but a vocation, which is why he devotes so much time each week and each year to getting better at his craft. There’s film study during the week, plus multiple crew meetings in the days leading up to kickoff, in which the officials go over unusual situations in other national games, pitfalls to avoid in this particular matchup and even scouting reports on each team, so that they know what to expect in terms of tempo, tendencies and formations.
“It’s not a full-time job, but in the fall, it is a full-time job,” Swartz said. “It’s an additional 20-30 hours a week of getting ready. It’s not like we show up on a Saturday morning, throw a uniform on and go out and work.”
Randolph is one of a growing population of women in football officiating. She played wide receiver and defensive back in a women’s full-contact semi-pro league for nearly a decade. To Randolph, a very detail-oriented person who has spent so much of her life as part of a team, it makes total sense that women would be interested in officiating, much like there’s been an uptick in women interested in coaching football. These are options available for those who want to spend their weekends on the sidelines. She gets a separate locker room in which to dress, but that’s the only difference. She’s ragged and teased just like everyone else during crew meals all week.
“Women love the game,” Randolph said. “We love being around the game. It’s an every-week challenge because no game is ever the same. No play is ever the same. Anything can happen between those lines and between those 22 players. It allows you to challenge yourself and have that challenge be not just for yourself but for your crew, too.”
Every official in this locker room has drawn the ire of a fan base — though most of them are spared any of that in this made-for-TV weeknight #MACtion game in front of a sparse in-person crowd.
“There’s no doubt when you do this that you have to have thick skin,” O’Dey said. “People yell at you. It’s part of it, whether it’s right, wrong or otherwise. It’s the way it is. Some people just can’t adapt to that. … People focus on the fact that all you’re doing out there is serving as a whipping post. But these guys are all football guys. My friends wear striped shirts. People say stuff like, ‘We’re ready to go to battle together,’ and, I mean, we aren’t going to war. But the bond that’s created when you’re out on the field, eight against the world, it creates some pretty good friendships. You know when one of ‘em’s going through a divorce. You know when one of ‘em has a 24-year-old son who’s moved back into the basement. We know each other. To me, that’s the cool part. Undoubtedly, when I do decide to quit doing this, that is what I will miss. I won’t necessarily miss the game. I’ll miss the relationships.”
In part because it is an unofficial second full-time job and perhaps mostly because it is a role that brings such public criticism, it is harder than ever to get people interested in officiating, said Bill Carollo, the coordinator of officials for the Collegiate Officiating Consortium (COC), which includes the Big Ten, the MAC and the Missouri Valley Conference.
Carollo spent two decades working in the NFL, including two Super Bowls, and he received death threats so severe he had to pull his children out of school — so he gets it.
“Nobody wants to do it because it’s just too hard,” Carollo said. “They don’t have thick enough skin. Why do something when you walk out on the field and are booed before we even kick off? Why would you do that?”
Most officials would say they do have that thick skin, and that the pride of a job well done offsets the criticism. Randolph says she likes feedback and the feeling of never being complacent.
Carollo spends a great deal of time thinking about how to get more people interested in officiating. He’s looking for people who know and love the game and are willing and able to learn a complicated rule book. But he’s also looking for the right temperament. That’s why the COC makes its officials take a Wonderlic test. Carollo wants to learn about people’s personalities, how they handle conflict and how they’d talk to coaches before a game to establish trust and respect. Are they problem-solvers? He tasks each official in the COC with mentoring those around them and finding people who might want to try out officiating.
The COC was formed in 2009 to recruit and develop officials at all of its levels, with a particular focus on establishing depth and diversity in its ranks. This type of investment is expensive and takes time, but it works. Carollo first met Randolph, the side judge in Wednesday’s game, before she had even worked a high school football game.
“You have to develop them, give them role models and show them that there is a career path — that you can be really successful and work the national championship game if you’re good, or go to the NFL,” Carollo said. “Most people don’t know how to get there. But if you have good communication and a program that can identify, train, promote and give them a pathway, we’re going to have some pretty good success.”
On this particular Wednesday evening, the game goes relatively smoothly. #MACtion often means chaos, but in this matchup, that is mostly limited to a handful of explosive offensive plays.
Assistant coordinator Bob Waggoner has been taking notes all game from his perch in the press box. He’s pleased with the pace of the game and the game management overall. There were no long replay reviews, and more importantly, replay correctly confirmed a touchdown. He notes certain moments in which officials could have been slightly better positioned on the field. One struggled with the wet football; he’ll bring that up after the final whistle.
After the game, Waggoner meets with the rain-soaked crew to give them their first round of feedback. He discusses a “disconcerting signals” penalty, as those on the field report back on what they heard and saw, and what coaches on each side had to say about it. Waggoner tells them they administered the game well, especially considering the challenging weather. He wants each official to self-evaluate and think about the flow of the game, including whether they stopped the clock sooner than they needed to in certain moments. They’ll each get a full written report in the coming days, but he wants to give them food for thought as they unwind.
This type of thorough training — the feedback, the clinics, offseason exams — helps create more consistency across the leagues in the way games are officiated overall and in the way certain penalties (such as targeting) are called. Officials get those written reports a couple of days after each game, with an independent staff from the NFL grading out each position. If the same official is making the same mistakes over and over with no effort to improve, that official will not advance up the ladder and earn more prestigious opportunities. He or she may even be pulled aside by Carollo and told they won’t be retained. Maybe they weren’t sharp enough and missed some answers on the written test. Perhaps they had too short of a fuse with coaches in multiple games or threw flags incessantly.
“One mistake doesn’t really get you fired,” Carollo said. “To work at the Division I level, you’ve got to consistently improve. … This program is really competitive. We’re going to rank them, and we’re going to stack them and measure them against each other. Only the top people stay.”
Every official undergoes multiple background checks each year. Failing to disclose something that pops up during a background check is something that could get an official fired on the spot — “a lot quicker than if you miss a pass interference call,” Carollo said. Officials can’t work games involving their alma maters or schools their children go to or employers of their spouses. O’Dey noted that he can’t go to a horse track or a casino from May until the last bowl game of the season. He doesn’t even use the word “parlay” in a sentence, even if it has nothing to do with gambling.
Officials also take tests every two weeks in the offseason, starting in February. They may answer 50 or 100 questions in an individual exam. They’ll spent months studying the rulebook, talking with other officials about new rules and watching film of themselves and other crews. Then there’s a proctored 25-question test that covers replay and on-field plays — supplemented by weekly 10-question quizzes in-season.
“When something happens on the field, you can’t go to the rulebook,” Carollo said. “You have to know the rule when it happens. So, that’s why they get tested throughout the year. That’s part of it, and the accumulation of all of those tests and quizzes.
“But the real test is, can you apply what you know under pressure in the game? One piece of it is knowing the rule. The other piece is: Can you pull the trigger? Do you have the judgment under pressure, in a first-place game, the last play of the game?”
T
Most of the officials here in Indiana will disperse to their home states and their day jobs before they take another assignment or two this season. Some might get asked to work a bowl game in the coming weeks. O’Dey said anyone who gets such an assignment needs to immediately text the whole crew so everyone can congratulate them.
“I don’t expect you to call us before you call your significant other,” the referee told his crew before Wednesday’s game. “But I want to know when you get the call, where you’re headed and what you’re doing. If you don’t get the call, don’t take it as this being an unsuccessful season. It’s a numbers game. If you don’t get the call but others on the crew do, they got the call because you helped them. Everybody gets credit for the success.
“So, let us know. Don’t make us read about it in an email.”
The farewells are short and sweet, with those who are done for the season letting everyone know how much they’ve enjoyed the work and the meals they’ve spent together this fall. The officials take their framed crew photos with them. They pack up their hats and their whistles and their flags. And they pack up the stripes that so often serve as a target on their backs, as they blend back into the background of a stadium buzzing as it empties, the surest sign of a job well done.
All-access with a MAC officiating crew: Inside college football’s most thankless job
By Nicole Auerbach 5h ago 16
MUNCIE, Ind. — The morning pregame meeting had gone later than usual, and that was after breakfast at the local diner had taken longer than usual. But Tim O’Dey was the head referee of Crew 6, and this was Crew 6’s last game together. So he was going to go as long as he wanted.
He had photos of the MAC officiating crew printed and framed so each member could take a keepsake with them when they left Scheumann Stadium last Wednesday night. And he had a whole speech prepared, to set the stage with kickoff for Ball State-Central Michigan about eight hours away.
O’Dey told his crew that they were among the best of the best, the 99th percentile. He had crunched the numbers and found there were fewer than 75 officiating crews assigned to work Football Bowl Subdivision games. The seven on-field officials and two replay officials in his audience made up one of them.
“We are all in pretty rare air here,” O’Dey said. “We all should take pride in what we have done with our careers because there are a lot of people who want to do what we get to do here tonight. But there is a reason that we’re here to do it. We have dedicated maybe more time than we should have toward this craft. We’ve spent a lot of time with the rulebook, a lot of time with one another, a lot of time figuring out what it takes to work football at this level.
“There are going to be thousands of people watching this game in bars across the country, and they’re going to think that they can do what we do out there — and they’re wrong. What we do is special. Don’t ever forget that.”
O’Dey is right. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people believe that they could do this job better than the men and women who do it. But what they don’t see when they yell at their screens or online is the amount of training, studying, film-watching and evaluation that goes into the profession. These officials all have so-called “real” jobs, too, often using vacation time and PTO to get to and from games, particularly those that fall in the middle of the week as Ball State-Central Michigan does.
Officiating is a largely thankless job, where your best days are marked by the fact that no one outside of your crew knows your name. You only receive public feedback when it’s criticism; just last week, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby reprimanded two Texas Tech broadcasters for naming and shaming each official working the Texas Tech-Iowa State game on air. The announcers were taken off the Red Raiders’ next broadcast. These jobs are challenging enough without someone inciting angry fans to track down individual officials in response to a series of subjective calls.
What those furious football fans in Big 12 country and elsewhere may not realize is how many tests officials have to pass to get and keep their jobs, and how frequently they’re evaluated. They won’t get promoted or work postseason games unless they routinely grade out well. They take a proctored exam each offseason. They finish each game physically and mentally exhausted, after weighing 10-12 decisions they have to make or not make on every play over a three-hour game. (O’Dey likens the feeling to taking a six-hour standardized test.)
And right after the game ends, they debrief in their locker room and work through the controversial calls, whatever coaches were upset about and everything they could have done better or more efficiently. Correct calls, no-calls, missed calls and operational mistakes all get their moment.
“People talk about how there’s no accountability in officiating, and that’s just not the truth,” O’Dey said. “There is more accountability on a more regular feedback basis than any job I’ve ever had — during the week (from officiating coordinators) and we get evaluated by the crowd on an instantaneous basis.
“If you screw up, you don’t have to wait for your six-month review to find out. You know right away.”
Adrenaline courses through the officials’ locker room in the minutes that follow the final whistle. Central Michigan beat Ball State 37-17 on a foggy, rainy night in which the weather had gotten worse as the evening went on. The officials peel off their many layers, water droplets flying, with a few people commenting that they lost feeling in their hands out there.
Like players and coaches, the officials are still wound up from three hours and seven minutes of being “on.” They dwell on what they could have done better and try to anticipate what’s coming when they get a copy of the game film. There will undoubtedly be a closer look at a rare penalty and a personal foul that possibly could have been avoided if an official had gotten between the players a little earlier. They’ll be graded individually on fouls called, no-calls and also their positioning on the field.
O’Dey will be asked to revisit the way in which he explained a touchdown that was confirmed by replay. He should have emphasized that the player maintained complete and continuous control of the ball as he went to the ground. It’s nitpicky, but it’s always better to overexplain than underexplain. That’s why referees are mic’d up to discuss the calls they make in the first place.
O’Dey has been working college football games for nearly two decades, first starting out working high school games in rural Nebraska back in 1997. His MAC crew is diverse in age, race and experience. The least experienced member is center judge Kyle Harbour, who is in his first year in the MAC and fifth overall in college football. John Swartz, the line judge, is about to finish up his ninth year in the MAC and 18th overall in college football. Nicole Randolph, who was filling in as the side judge for this particular game, was the lone woman on the crew.
Everyone who gets into officiating does so for the same core reason: They love the sport and want to be around it. They want to give back. Some tried to play or coach first, but that dream either ended or proved not to be sustainable. O’Dey knew he wanted to be an engineer but had long tossed around the idea of officiating high school football games on the side; one day, a guy he was playing basketball with suggested he attend a meeting. It all escalated from there — the high school games, all the clinics, his foray into NAIA and other small-college games. He has used countless days of PTO to make this work, and he’s missed his sons’ games and other family events to chase his passion.
Swartz, who works for the supermarket chain Wegmans, considers officiating not a job but a vocation, which is why he devotes so much time each week and each year to getting better at his craft. There’s film study during the week, plus multiple crew meetings in the days leading up to kickoff, in which the officials go over unusual situations in other national games, pitfalls to avoid in this particular matchup and even scouting reports on each team, so that they know what to expect in terms of tempo, tendencies and formations.
“It’s not a full-time job, but in the fall, it is a full-time job,” Swartz said. “It’s an additional 20-30 hours a week of getting ready. It’s not like we show up on a Saturday morning, throw a uniform on and go out and work.”
Randolph is one of a growing population of women in football officiating. She played wide receiver and defensive back in a women’s full-contact semi-pro league for nearly a decade. To Randolph, a very detail-oriented person who has spent so much of her life as part of a team, it makes total sense that women would be interested in officiating, much like there’s been an uptick in women interested in coaching football. These are options available for those who want to spend their weekends on the sidelines. She gets a separate locker room in which to dress, but that’s the only difference. She’s ragged and teased just like everyone else during crew meals all week.
“Women love the game,” Randolph said. “We love being around the game. It’s an every-week challenge because no game is ever the same. No play is ever the same. Anything can happen between those lines and between those 22 players. It allows you to challenge yourself and have that challenge be not just for yourself but for your crew, too.”
Every official in this locker room has drawn the ire of a fan base — though most of them are spared any of that in this made-for-TV weeknight #MACtion game in front of a sparse in-person crowd.
“There’s no doubt when you do this that you have to have thick skin,” O’Dey said. “People yell at you. It’s part of it, whether it’s right, wrong or otherwise. It’s the way it is. Some people just can’t adapt to that. … People focus on the fact that all you’re doing out there is serving as a whipping post. But these guys are all football guys. My friends wear striped shirts. People say stuff like, ‘We’re ready to go to battle together,’ and, I mean, we aren’t going to war. But the bond that’s created when you’re out on the field, eight against the world, it creates some pretty good friendships. You know when one of ‘em’s going through a divorce. You know when one of ‘em has a 24-year-old son who’s moved back into the basement. We know each other. To me, that’s the cool part. Undoubtedly, when I do decide to quit doing this, that is what I will miss. I won’t necessarily miss the game. I’ll miss the relationships.”
In part because it is an unofficial second full-time job and perhaps mostly because it is a role that brings such public criticism, it is harder than ever to get people interested in officiating, said Bill Carollo, the coordinator of officials for the Collegiate Officiating Consortium (COC), which includes the Big Ten, the MAC and the Missouri Valley Conference.
Carollo spent two decades working in the NFL, including two Super Bowls, and he received death threats so severe he had to pull his children out of school — so he gets it.
“Nobody wants to do it because it’s just too hard,” Carollo said. “They don’t have thick enough skin. Why do something when you walk out on the field and are booed before we even kick off? Why would you do that?”
Most officials would say they do have that thick skin, and that the pride of a job well done offsets the criticism. Randolph says she likes feedback and the feeling of never being complacent.
Carollo spends a great deal of time thinking about how to get more people interested in officiating. He’s looking for people who know and love the game and are willing and able to learn a complicated rule book. But he’s also looking for the right temperament. That’s why the COC makes its officials take a Wonderlic test. Carollo wants to learn about people’s personalities, how they handle conflict and how they’d talk to coaches before a game to establish trust and respect. Are they problem-solvers? He tasks each official in the COC with mentoring those around them and finding people who might want to try out officiating.
The COC was formed in 2009 to recruit and develop officials at all of its levels, with a particular focus on establishing depth and diversity in its ranks. This type of investment is expensive and takes time, but it works. Carollo first met Randolph, the side judge in Wednesday’s game, before she had even worked a high school football game.
“You have to develop them, give them role models and show them that there is a career path — that you can be really successful and work the national championship game if you’re good, or go to the NFL,” Carollo said. “Most people don’t know how to get there. But if you have good communication and a program that can identify, train, promote and give them a pathway, we’re going to have some pretty good success.”
On this particular Wednesday evening, the game goes relatively smoothly. #MACtion often means chaos, but in this matchup, that is mostly limited to a handful of explosive offensive plays.
Assistant coordinator Bob Waggoner has been taking notes all game from his perch in the press box. He’s pleased with the pace of the game and the game management overall. There were no long replay reviews, and more importantly, replay correctly confirmed a touchdown. He notes certain moments in which officials could have been slightly better positioned on the field. One struggled with the wet football; he’ll bring that up after the final whistle.
After the game, Waggoner meets with the rain-soaked crew to give them their first round of feedback. He discusses a “disconcerting signals” penalty, as those on the field report back on what they heard and saw, and what coaches on each side had to say about it. Waggoner tells them they administered the game well, especially considering the challenging weather. He wants each official to self-evaluate and think about the flow of the game, including whether they stopped the clock sooner than they needed to in certain moments. They’ll each get a full written report in the coming days, but he wants to give them food for thought as they unwind.
This type of thorough training — the feedback, the clinics, offseason exams — helps create more consistency across the leagues in the way games are officiated overall and in the way certain penalties (such as targeting) are called. Officials get those written reports a couple of days after each game, with an independent staff from the NFL grading out each position. If the same official is making the same mistakes over and over with no effort to improve, that official will not advance up the ladder and earn more prestigious opportunities. He or she may even be pulled aside by Carollo and told they won’t be retained. Maybe they weren’t sharp enough and missed some answers on the written test. Perhaps they had too short of a fuse with coaches in multiple games or threw flags incessantly.
“One mistake doesn’t really get you fired,” Carollo said. “To work at the Division I level, you’ve got to consistently improve. … This program is really competitive. We’re going to rank them, and we’re going to stack them and measure them against each other. Only the top people stay.”
Every official undergoes multiple background checks each year. Failing to disclose something that pops up during a background check is something that could get an official fired on the spot — “a lot quicker than if you miss a pass interference call,” Carollo said. Officials can’t work games involving their alma maters or schools their children go to or employers of their spouses. O’Dey noted that he can’t go to a horse track or a casino from May until the last bowl game of the season. He doesn’t even use the word “parlay” in a sentence, even if it has nothing to do with gambling.
Officials also take tests every two weeks in the offseason, starting in February. They may answer 50 or 100 questions in an individual exam. They’ll spent months studying the rulebook, talking with other officials about new rules and watching film of themselves and other crews. Then there’s a proctored 25-question test that covers replay and on-field plays — supplemented by weekly 10-question quizzes in-season.
“When something happens on the field, you can’t go to the rulebook,” Carollo said. “You have to know the rule when it happens. So, that’s why they get tested throughout the year. That’s part of it, and the accumulation of all of those tests and quizzes.
“But the real test is, can you apply what you know under pressure in the game? One piece of it is knowing the rule. The other piece is: Can you pull the trigger? Do you have the judgment under pressure, in a first-place game, the last play of the game?”
T
Most of the officials here in Indiana will disperse to their home states and their day jobs before they take another assignment or two this season. Some might get asked to work a bowl game in the coming weeks. O’Dey said anyone who gets such an assignment needs to immediately text the whole crew so everyone can congratulate them.
“I don’t expect you to call us before you call your significant other,” the referee told his crew before Wednesday’s game. “But I want to know when you get the call, where you’re headed and what you’re doing. If you don’t get the call, don’t take it as this being an unsuccessful season. It’s a numbers game. If you don’t get the call but others on the crew do, they got the call because you helped them. Everybody gets credit for the success.
“So, let us know. Don’t make us read about it in an email.”
The farewells are short and sweet, with those who are done for the season letting everyone know how much they’ve enjoyed the work and the meals they’ve spent together this fall. The officials take their framed crew photos with them. They pack up their hats and their whistles and their flags. And they pack up the stripes that so often serve as a target on their backs, as they blend back into the background of a stadium buzzing as it empties, the surest sign of a job well done.