Southwest Referees Makes Demands of USRowing

Top referees in the Southwest region will no longer work at USRowing regattas after the first of the year unless the national governing body improves working conditions.

Dissatisfied with the current treatment of referees, a group of seven clinicians—the designation for the most skilled and experienced referees—is seeking to establish minimum standards for stipends, travel expenses, and hotel accommodations to improve the retention, recruitment, and diversity of the referee corps.

The demands were specified in a letter to USRowing CEO Amanda Kraus and shared with the other 45 referees in the region, who were encouraged, though not required, to take them into account when selecting which regattas to work.

“The referees feel like they’re not treated with the dignity and respect that’s fair for the amount of time we put in, for the amount of love and care we put in,” said clinician Taylor Gooch.

The clinicians are requesting minimum daily stipends ranging from $175 for assistant referees to $400 for chiefs.

Their other demands:

—Meals on site and full reimbursement of travel expenses

—Airfare and a checked bag for regattas farther than 100 miles away

—Full coverage, including insurance, for rental cars

—Single-occupancy hotel rooms

The referees have voiced their complaints directly to USRowing and through participation on committees, but, said Gooch, “the conversation wasn’t going anywhere, and we had to put a stake in the sand.”

USRowing contends that the referees have not expressed their concerns to the governing body appropriately. In an email to the Southwest clinicians, Tom Rooks, USRowing’s director of Safeguarding, said the regional referee coordinator had not heard from clinicians about their pay and travel demands. Nor, in the last five months, had he or Hugh McAdam, the USRowing official who oversees referee programs.

Bryan Fraser, referee coordinator for the Southwest region, said he was aware, however, of conversations among the clinicians that led to the 2025 ultimatum.

“Every time USRowing has reached out, the referees provide feedback, and USRowing proceeds to make no changes. We have still not received everything that was promised in 2019,” he said.

“We take all feedback from our referee corps into consideration and place great emphasis on listening to their needs and meeting them where possible,” responded Lizzie Seedhouse, USRowing’s chief marketing officer.

“USRowing already meets several of these demands and has been for many years, while others require in-depth analysis to ascertain and measure the impact on USRowing’s ability to offer sustainable and affordable regattas for our athletes to compete in.”

Every year, many regattas take place that are not run by USRowing or don’t use licensed referees.

The American Collegiate Rowing Association (ACRA) national championship employs static refereeing (referees are stationed along the course instead of following the racing in launches). This decreases the number of referees required to run a fair national-championship regatta and minimizes their footprint, and wakes, on the racecourse.

The Foot of the Charles, held annually in November on Boston’s Charles River, doesn’t employ referees at all. Coaches from local universities run the regatta, which is held over a course longer than the actual Head of the Charles and hosts a handful of out-of-town teams in addition to local crews. Coaches corral crews in the starting area, call them across the start line, are stationed along the course for traffic control and safety, and run all of the timing. This has been done regularly without incident.

At many USRowing-run regattas, referees can spend 12 hours a day at the regatta site for as many as three days (as is the case at the Southwest Youth Championships), then share a hotel room. This, Gooch says, leaves referees without time to decompress or enjoy personal space during a long and stressful several days of running a regional championship.

The clinicians argue that these issues impact the retention of existing referees and the recruitment of new ones, a topic explored in depth in “The Looming Ref Crisis”. The current per diem rates have made it difficult to fill a full referee jury. To complete the jury at the Southwest Youth Championships this year, USRowing had to fly out referees from other regions because local referees were dissatisfied with the current stipend and hotel situation, said Gooch, who served as chief referee.

Limited financial support for referees, who often take time off from work to serve at regattas, limits the referee pool to those who have the financial resources or are no longer working.

“It’s people who can afford to take off the time, afford to not make that money,” Gooch said. “That in and of itself is selecting a group of referees who are not representative of our rowing population in a way that doesn’t feel right to all of us clinicians.”

The stipend demands of the Southwest clinicians are not far from USRowing’s 2024 allowances and, in fact, some of the demands are being met already. This year, all referees received a base of $175 per regatta day at USRowing-run events, while deputies and chiefs received an additional bonus ranging from $175 to $1,500 per event depending on their position on the jury and whether they were working a regional or national championship (the chief referee at Nationals would receive $2,200 for the four-day regatta).

USRowing provided single-occupancy rooms only for referees at the national-championship regattas—the Youth National Championships and RowFest National Championship. Deputy chief referees who received $700 for working a three-day regional regatta in 2024 would, under the newly proposed system, receive $1,050 next year. Assistant referees, who are not yet licensed fully, would see no increase in their daily stipend but would benefit from single-occupancy rooms at all regattas.

Though stipend boosts are modest for each individual referee, the cumulative cost for a regatta would be significant. The move from double- to single-occupancy rooms alone would double the cost of what already is one of a regatta’s biggest budget lines. When the IRA National Championship regatta moved to providing all referees and regatta staff with single- occupancy rooms, hotel costs jumped from $11,000 to $23,000.

The referees have had discussions with Monica Hilcu, head coach of Redwood Scullers and organizer of the Head of the Lagoon, a regatta well on its way to meeting their wishes (for starters, all referees will have single-occupancy rooms).

“If Redwood Scullers can do this for the Head of the Lagoon, there’s no reason USRowing can’t do it for this year’s Southwest championships,” Gooch said.

Their demands, the clinicians emphasize, are not about meeting a specific dollar amount but about what meeting these minimums signifies to members of the corps.

“I want to walk away from regattas that I chief for USRowing and have the referees feel like they were treated with dignity and respect by USRowing,” Gooch said, “and I haven’t felt that way for years.”
   

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