Don Richards

George Carlin, a comedian I enjoy most of the time once said, "I was thinking people seem to read the Bible a lot more as they get older. Then it dawned on me: they're cramming for their final exam."

Tom Carroll, former UWRF football player and Falcon captain, a veteran official, and a former coach, is not quite ready for his final exam or even his last game as a game official. Here he discusses how he got into refereeing.

"My motivation to become an official was one of my college professors, Don Page,” Carroll said. “I was encouraged by many of my college teammates to take an officiating class from Mr. Page and so I did. During my sophomore year in college when I was 19 years old I took the officiating class and got involved.

"I started officiating lower-level basketball games when I was 19 and I continued to officiate basketball games until I was 42 years old. In those 23 years I was working about 50 varsity basketball games per year. I was fortunate to have worked two Wisconsin State Girls Basketball Tournaments. In those 23 years I probably worked about 900 games.

 "In 1989 I became an assistant high school principal, so I gave up my officiating because of the added duties of being a high school administrator. When I retired from being an administrator in 2006 I began my career as a football official and today I'm working about 12 varsity games and about 20 lower level football games per year."

His assessment of the dearth of officials: "I believe that our young people may not be interested in becoming an official for many reasons; they want to spend more time with their families, they don't want to be subjected to harassment by parents and fans and they have other interests."

A question I asked of Carroll was "Do officials call makeup calls?" and his reply was "I don't believe any good officials call 'makeup calls'. It is not our desire or want to call fouls or penalties on players." 

He encourages young people to get involved in officiating. It should be apparent to all sports fans that without officials there will be no sports contests.

Just as Carroll enjoyed playing football, UWRF assistant track and field coach Jordan Gray had a positive experience competing at the highest levels recently.

"This summer I competed at the USA Track and Field Championships in the Heptathlon where I placed seventh and earned a place on Team USA,” Gray said. “From there I went to France for a Women's Decathlon where I placed first and am now currently the #1 ranked Decathlete in the world. After that, I was on Team USA for the Heptathlon in Germany for the Thorpe Cup Competition where I got bronze." 

She plans to continue competing until the 2028 Olympics.

An American record holder in the Decathlon (8,246 points) and world record holder in the Decathlon Long Jump, Gray was a standout athlete at Kennesaw State University (Georgia) from 2014-19 and set 16 school records, 10 superlative of combined events. A four-time NCAA Division I All-American and two-time National Champion in the Women's Decathlon, Gray was a 10-time Atlantic Sun Conference/ASUN Champion, two-time ASUN MVP, and four-time ASUN Most Outstanding Field Athlete.
While competing at the international level, Gray has twice represented Team USA at the Thorpe Cup competition in Germany and qualified and competed at the 2021 Olympic Trials in the Heptathlon.
Gray, a native of Ball Ground, Ga., graduated from Kennesaw State University in 2019 with a degree in Integrated Studies with focuses in Exercise Science and Journalism. She also minored in Coaching and is a USA Track & Field certified coach.

She has a petition on LetWomenDecathlon.org that has over 30,000 signatures to allow women to do the decathlon in the Olympics for the first time ever. There is also a TedXTalk she did in Boston.

I hope I didn't forget anything I was asked to include. I don't want to be like Leo Rosenberg (I'm not sure who he is either) who said, "First you forget names, then faces. Then you forget to zip your zipper up. Then you forget to zip it down."

That could be embarrassing.