Diversity initiative, aided by state grant, brings in 77 new football officials

Tom Mullahey had a feeling that an initiative to bring in and train more game officials and create more diversity among the ranks was going to be a success.

How successful it has become was something that caught Clifton’s athletic director off guard.

The Diverse Officials in High School Football Scholarship Initiative is a broad partnership that has helped produce 77 newly certified high school officials who will be able to referee sub-varsity games starting this fall.

The partnership includes every high school football conference in New Jersey, in cooperation with the New Jersey Football Officials Association as well as the NJ Football Coaches Association and the NJ Minority Coaches Association, all of whom benefited greatly from a grant secured last year by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Paul Sarlo (D-Bergen).

The 77 officials are an uptick from just the 21 cadets who completed the course before the pandemic. The $50,000 Community Block Grant from the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs will help reimburse the new officials for their coursework via a scholarship.

The initiative was brought forth to bring in a more diverse pool of officials and to help with a shortage of officials, which has been an issue throughout all sports over the last few years.

“It was a big part of it,” said Mullahey, who helped spearhead the initiative. “Most sports are seeing officials shortages, so our idea was to pilot it through football since we already have the football assignor and the head of the football coaches association (involved).

“Six of us met with all the head state college football coaches, and they were all in. What we wanted from them was to pump this out to your athletes who graduated. People that just want to be around the game and make some money. We got a couple of females as well, and that was a goal as well. We had people from Cape May and we had people from Sussex County.

“I think we got a really good cross-section of the state and we’re excited to roll it out.”

South Jersey, which saw only three officials complete the program last year, saw 40 officials finish it this year, according to Mullahey.

Since the program began, the association has added the state Minority Coaches Association, with the belief that there needs to be a more diverse crop of officials. The newly formed initiative is designed to offset initial investments incurred by officials in training.

“I was impressed,” Sarlo said. “The coaches association and the officials association, those are the guys and gals who made the recruitment effort. Numbers are great. I’m very pleased with the total and I’m also pleased with the pool of candidates.

“Anytime it comes to the integrity of high school sports, I am willing to stand up and preserve the integrity of high school sports. The first way to preserve it is getting a new pool of officials who could relate to changing demographics across our landscape. I was very pleased and very happy to be a part of it.”

Mark Bitar, one of the football assignors for the Super Football Conference and the North Jersey Interscholastic Conference, spoke with Mullahey and others one evening during dinner and told them about a training program he was doing and how incentive it was to bring in new game officials.

Bitar took the lead, and the training was partially done via Zoom calls, which helped cadets not have to drive to a central location. At one point, 100 cadets were involved, with 77 completed the training. The officials officiated a 7-on-7 girls flag football put on by the New York Jets.

Mullahey called the initiative a success.

“We’re hoping that the NJSIAA uses this as a model, and they are talking about using this going forward to recruit officials in other sports,” he said. “This was a true team effort and it was great to work with people from all regions. Every football conference was on board, every officials association was on board. You don’t always see that, and when you see everybody working together, this is what we can accomplish.”

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You can reach Luis Torres at ltorres@njadvancemedia.com and you can follow him on Twitter @ByLuisTorres.