I mentioned in an earlier article about the shortage of officials and encouraged young people to try their hand at officiating.

Today, I’ll talk about a game that will probably discourage them.

It was, without a doubt, the worst experience in my officiating career.

In fact, my partner in the game, Dick Suhr — a very good, veteran official who had officiated a state championship game — quit officiating after the experience.

It was the regional final in girls’ basketball.

The tournament site was in Frankenmuth, and the Frankenmuth team was in the finals against heavily favored Flint Beecher.

Before the game even started there were problems.

The tournament pairing sheet clearly stated that the top team in each pairing was to be the home team and wear the home white jerseys.

Frankenmuth was in the top pairing and thus the “home” team. But the Beecher girls only brought their white home jerseys with them. Beecher’s coach wanted Frankenmuth to wear their away red jerseys, but those uniforms were at the girls’ homes, not at the school, and the Frankenmuth coach — rightly — refused to send his girls home to get them.

There wouldn’t have been time, anyway.

To Beecher’s dismay, the only solution so the game could be played was to have Beecher wear the Frankenmuth girls’ junior varsity jerseys. The Beecher coach, team, and fans were not happy campers, but it was their own fault for not correctly reading the pairings schedule.

Now, as I mentioned, Beecher was the heavy favorite to win.

However, early on, every shot that Frankenmuth took seemed to go in the basket, and every shot Beecher took seemed to miss. So Frankenmuth took an early lead in the game.

As the game went on, Frankenmuth surprisingly kept the lead, and the Beecher fans got more and more obnoxious.

It seemed like the Beecher fans were strategically positioned all over the gym in places where they could give us officials the most abuse. When there was a free throw, there were Beecher fans right behind the backboard, screaming and shouting at us. When we went to the scorer’s table to report a foul, there were Beecher fans sitting right behind the official scorer and timer, pointing fingers and yelling.

Things got so bad that, after a time out, my partner said, “We’re shooting free throws.”

I said, “No, Dick. We had a travel violation and it is a ball out of bounds. It was at the previous time out where we shot free throws.”

He wouldn’t believe me, and we had to go to the scorer’s table to get confirmation that I was correct.

In the yelling and screaming, Dick mentally lost a whole segment of the game.

Frankenmuth won the game, but that didn’t end things.

We were getting showered and dressed when Andy, the dad of a Frankenmuth player and a principal at another local high school whom we knew well, came into our locker room.

He said, “I don’t think you want to take the normal exit through the gym. The Beecher fans are all out there milling around and are still unhappy and causing a scene. It could get ugly.”

Never having had such an issue before, I had naively parked my car (the infamous Volkswagen Beetle that I told you about earlier) right in front of the school. Thankfully, there was a rear exit to the locker room that led to the football field.

I gave Andy the keys to the VW and he drove it around to the back door and we got out of Dodge without being seen by the angry crowd.

I need to add that that was a total outlier to my officiating career.

Certainly, I have heard boos. Certainly, I have had coaches upset with calls. But never was there anything approaching that incident in 53 years of calling games.

Since I have a little space remaining, I’ll tell you one of those small, embarrassing moments that happen in a game.

It was a ninth-grade boys basketball game in the tiny basement gym of St. Mary’s Cathedral.

There was a pass that went out of bounds.

I retrieved the ball while pointing the direction of play and calling “blue.” I turned to find five players wearing blue shirts, ready to play defense, four players wearing white shirts, lined up to play offense, and the fifth white shirt waiting for me to hand him the ball.

All 10 players knew it was white’s ball.

The only person who didn’t know was me.

Les Miller, of Hubbard Lake, has retired after 53 years officiating multiple sports around Michigan. He can be reached at theoldref@yahoo.com.