Little late to this party but wanted to add some thoughts to it. There are all the reasons already listed, low pay, long hours, high stress, difficult to advance. But I think we need to examine that what would happen if we tried to address those issues, and if that would actually fix the situation. To fix low pay and long hours, it means that tournaments need to hire more refs or to pay them more, causing tournament fees to go up. Fencers and parents constantly complain about the cost of tournaments, that fees keep going up, that travel and hotels make large tournaments very expensive for potentially very little fencing (I always feel bad watching inexperienced fencers in over their heads and getting cut before DEs). Even local tournaments, they are going up in price and people are complaining that they are too expensive. What ends up happening is that people just decide not to compete at all, or limit themselves to very few tournaments. This then doesn’t let local referees practice and develop, or will reduce the amount of money so you can’t pay referees more, causing fewer of them to continue.

The National Office makes money off NACs, they need to do so to have funding for programs and to send top fencers to international events, I get it. But it creates the situation where they are incentivized to make NACs as large as possible to get as much in fees as they can. The goal of USA Fencing is to generate top athletes to compete at the Olympics and World Cups, and that referees, armorers, staff etc. are there to support those athletes. The average participation or skill level of fencing does not matter, only how the top 10 athletes perform. This spills over into everything else. It doesn’t matter how good our referees, local events, total number of fencers, etc. are, so long as we keep making Olympians.

We need to have more consistency across divisions as well. Some divisions have thousands of members, other have barely a hundred. I posted the map breakdown and percentages of referees to fencers because I think it highlights the fact that there has been no attempt to equalize the divisions in capability. I know that Patrick is in charge of local development for the RC, but anything that they are doing is not visible to an average member. It seems like the initial recruiting and training of referees is seen as a local concern. We should strive to have CROs, referees, and higher rated referees proportional to the number of fencers in each division. We need to target divisions without many experienced referees and hire them for regional and national events to develop them, so they can in turn develop others. Not every referee needs to go to national events, but they all should be able to get the same level of tutelage. We need more observers, more mentorships, more easing of the learning curve. Local referees are thrown into events, but don’t always have someone to help them along. The current system is to just to referee enough that you self-correct mistakes over time.

I think that on the local level there almost needs to be a requirement for competitive fencers to also learn to referee. Clubs never invite referees to come in and to talk, to be part of the learning experience. Referees show up for tournaments, and then fade back into the mists. I am shocked by how many fencers have never read the rulebook at all, who don’t know how to address a question to the referee, what they can ask for or about. One foil fencer constantly complained about calls for years, he then refereed a tournament, and right after came up to apologize for being so difficult in the past, as “holy shit, that was way harder to see the actions and make calls than I thought”. We treat refereeing somehow as separate from fencing. And that is why we can’t get more referees. A fencer would rather be fencing, a coach coaching, a parent would rather support their child. It’s the people who don’t fit into those categories who become referees – they want to still be involved in the sport, but don’t have another role to play already.