Olympus senior Nick Ward stretched in midair, extending his right arm toward the football that spiraled out of his reach. His eyes followed the ball, and as his foot touched the turf, a force from behind sent him flying the opposite direction. He crumpled.
Darkness.
When Ward came to, the trainers were running to treat him. His neck ached. They told him to lie still.
No flag had been thrown on the play. From the sidelines, someone yelled, “We’ve got to protect our players.”
Injuries always are a risk in football, but as Utah struggles to fill officiating positions in a nationwide shortage of youth and high school officials, it becomes harder to enforce consistently new safety rules across the state.
Utah High School Activities Association director of officiating Jeff Cluff received an all-too-familiar email last week drawing his attention to targeting calls that a school felt should have been made. This time, it was from Olympus High School requesting the UHSAA review a series of calls from its game last Friday night at Lehi.
“We’re not vindictive,” Titans coach Aaron Whitehead said. “We are not going after any particular officials. I just think there needs to be education all the way around.”
Cluff estimates that he receives upward of 100 emails from school officials, coaches and parents (although the UHSAA encourages parents to contact their schools rather than the UHSAA) most weeks regarding various calls from the roughly 50 high school football games played on a Friday night. Cluff and members of the joint board of officials review those complaints.
In addition, Cluff said for the past two years they have requested game film from the schools and use it as training for officials around the state. Cluff said they did so with the Olympus-Lehi film and discussed the game with the officials, something that is not out of the ordinary.
“Using paraprofessionals like we do — officials basically that have other jobs and don’t do it full time — obviously the ratio of the number of errors that they make is going to be increased as a result,” Cluff said. “It’s high school football. They’re going to miss calls. And I believe based upon the things that I’ve seen, there were some misses in this game.”
Cluff declined to comment on specific calls in the game, but two of the plays in question look from the video like clear missed penalties. Others are a little more subjective, and the referees didn’t have the advantage of video replay.
Whitehead said he thought three helmet-to-helmet or defenseless player penalties should have been called.
“The first, there was no injury to it, but it was an easy call to make, and the call wasn’t made,” he said. “Had the call been made at that point, we feel that those other two may have been avoided.”
Ward lay on the field for almost 20 minutes after the hard hit in the fourth quarter that knocked him out briefly. Medical professionals, coaches, family and teammates formed a circle around him.
His father, David Ward, was among them and described Nick as being a little glossy-eyed but otherwise alert. Nick told him he probably could get up, but the trainers disagreed.
“Just hoping I was going to be OK and that it wasn’t anything too serious,” Ward said about his thoughts as he lay on the cold turf. “But when they told me I had to go in the ambulance, I was kind of freaking out because I didn’t want it to be anything big.”
Paramedics carried Nick Ward off the field on a stretcher and took him to American Fork Hospital for precautionary testing. His CT scan came back clear, and he was diagnosed with a concussion. Ward said he hopes he only will be out for a week, and he returned to a full class schedule Wednesday despite a lingering headache.
“I’m glad nothing serious happened to him other than a concussion,” David Ward said, “although a concussion is very serious as well.”
High school football has adopted a series of rules to improve player safety in recent years, including the defenseless player rule and targeting. The National Federation of State High School Associations made illegal just this season blindside blocks unless initiated with open hands.
While the UHSAA has been working hard to educate its officials about those rule changes, Cluff said its pool of experienced officials continues to shrink.
Through proactive recruiting, Cluff said, the UHSAA had been able to keep the overall number of registered football officials relatively steady since 2010, aside from a low of 547 officials in 2015. The 595 registered football officials this season is a slight improvement over last year’s 581; the high mark was 613 in 2011.
As schools continue to open around Utah, however, maintaining consistent numbers leaves the UHSAA strapped for officials. The level of experience throughout the pool has diminished, with 12 varsity officials leaving for various reasons after last season alone. The average age of a Utah high school referee is 58.
“Not trying to make an excuse, because I am not,” Cluff said about the shortage, “but we’re trying to do all we can to ensure risk minimization. … We want to be the very best that we can be, and we don’t like to be wrong. We don’t like to miss plays.”
The problem is not isolated to one or two occurrences a season. While the Titans suffered the effects of it against Lehi, Olympus was penalized the week before against West for two similar plays — a blindside block and a hit on a defenseless player.
Whitehead said his team worked all week in practice to prevent those penalties in the future. That focus was motivated in part by a set of officials that diligently enforced punishments for contact that endangered players.
“I think everybody had to do a better job,” said David Ward, who walked into a hospital room last week to see his son lying down with his facemask removed and head strapped to the table. “I think the [officials] have got to do a better job. I think the coaches have to do a better job teaching their players how to tackle. I think spectators and people that love football have to do a better job of, when those kind of plays happen, not [making referees] damned if they do, damned if they don’t.”