Central Michigan University Athletics
Calling it a Game
4/3/2006 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
April 3, 2006
Reprinted with permission from the 2006 NCAA Women's Final Four Official Game Program.
By Jane Burns
Pencil in hand, Marcy Weston sat in front of the TV one day this winter to watch yet another women's basketball game. The longtime NCAA coordinator of women's basketball officiating planned to spend another night checking out what her TiVo had to offer and what she had to offer to the officials she watched work the game.
"I knew two of the referees. I didn't know the third," Weston said. "I was going to call the Big 12 office. Then it occurred to me: I threw the pencil on the floor and said, `I don't have to do this.' "
Indeed, she didn't. After four decades of being involved with women's basketball officiating, the past 21 as an official or unofficial NCAA coordinator, Weston retired from the game last fall. She'll keep her day job as senior associate director of athletics at Central Michigan, but turned over her NCAA official job to Mary Struckhoff.
"She is a legend," said Patty Broderick, coordinator of officials for the Big Ten, Mid-Continent and Great Lakes Valley Conferences, the Horizon League, Conference USA and the WNBA. "She's done so much for the first 25 years of the NCAA. She put everything in place that is there now."
Weston's is a quiet legend to people outside the game, but there's no denying her impact. While any fan knows that the players and coaches have improved in 25 years, Weston has made sure the officials have kept up. Those better players and coaches got the best officiated game that was possible, and that was because of the work Weston has done. Those in the know know; in 2000 Weston earned a place in the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame.
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Weston was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 2000.  |
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DePaul Director of Athletics Jean Lenti Ponsetto, the former NCAA Division I Women's Basketball Committee chair, said the fact that Weston isn't a household name outside of the game is a credit to the job she has done. No one had to complain that the officiating was ever a problem in women's basketball because it never was.
"It's been pretty seamless," said Ponsetto, who has served on two NCAA officiating committees with Weston. "The officiating has grown and kept pace with the game. That's a real positive, it's a credit to Marcy's professionalism."
Weston's ties to NCAA women's basketball began in its first year; she was an official for the 1982 title game. She would have officiated the next year, too, except an emergency appendectomy the week before the tournament sidelined her.
"The Big Ten had asked me to coordinate their officials in 1984 and I said, `Well, if I get another Final Four, I'll do it.'Well, I got one and I thought, OK, I'll quit while I'm ahead.' "
The next season, she took that Big Ten job. Back then Weston became one of only three conference officiating coordinators.
At the same time, she became women's basketball's first secretary-rules editor. Officiating was evolving with the game, and it was a welcome change for Weston and everyone else.
"When I took over the Big Ten in 1984, (current Stanford coach) Tara VanDerveer was at Ohio State and she was assigning officials in the Big Ten," Weston said. "It's laughable."
Prior to that, coaches or administrators called and asked her to work their games. They just assumed she would find a partner and didn't even ask who it would be.
"They'd say, `I have 12 home games, can you do six of them?' " she said. "Well, you wouldn't do six home games now, they'd give you a varsity jacket."
In 1986 she became the unofficial national coordinator of women's basketball officiating, working with the Division I Women's Basketball Committee to assign officials for the NCAA tournament.
Assigning the regular season began to end up in the hands of conference coordinators and between fall clinics and Weston's knowledge of the rule book to serve as the final word, women's basketball officiating began to improve and grow. In 1996, she officially took on the title of national coordinator of women's basketball officiating.
"It wasn't the inquisition then," she said of the first years as the official coordinator. The increase in the visibility of the women's game has increased the pressure on officials to get the job right. The increased speed and athleticism of the players has meant the referees need to be sharper than ever. As the women's game improves, much more is at stake and the referees have to be at their best all the time.
"As an official, you never want to be on SportsCenter, unless you're in the background on a great play," Weston said. "If you're a topic, that's bad."
What was once a job that mostly required putting on fall clinics and assigning the Women's Final Four has become a year-round program of evaluation, feedback, Web sites and meetings with all 31 conference coordinators.
That's all a far cry from where Weston began in the game. As a former player in Detroit's Catholic League she thought officiating basketball would be a fun way to earn some pocket money. She took an officiating class during her sophomore year at Dayton and the instructor took Weston and some classmates to officiate junior high and high school games. She was hooked.
"Good athletes who understand a game have basic tools to be an official," she said, citing her love of playing basketball as a skill that helped her officiate from the beginning. "In this era, elite athletes would never want to officiate because who would want to go from all that adulation to being crucified?"
She took a junior high school teaching job after graduating, and continued to officiate. She continued to do so while in graduate school and after taking over at Wisconsin-Whitewater, where she was the head softball and field hockey coach, and assistant basketball coach and physical education instructor.
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Weston coached the Chippewa volleyball team to a school-record 54 wins in 1981. |
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In 1972, she went to Central Michigan as the head field hockey coach, assistant basketball coach and physical education instructor.
"Then the volleyball coach quit and they said, `We can hire another field hockey coach, but nobody wants to do volleyball.' So I said, `I'll do volleyball,' " Weston said. "I thought I'd give up the basketball (coaching) to go back to officiating."
Recruiting wasn't a part of any sport then for women's athletics, so when a season ended, it ended. That gave Weston the chance to juggle jobs, and she's done it ever since.
"Not one human being thought I made the right decision to coach volleyball, because volleyball was nothing in 1974," Weston said. "And it was the best decision I ever made."
Weston's decision to coach volleyball didn't just work out for her officiating schedule; it worked out for the school. In 1981, Central Michigan won 54 matches, a school record that still stands.
Weston's background as a coach helped her understand all sides of a situation, which coaches and players appreciated.
"She has good people skills," Broderick said of Weston. "She could take a bad situation and let people walk away from it instead of it turning into World War III."
It isn't always easy. In 1998, officials missed a call at the end of an NCAA tournament game between UCLA and Alabama and the error was the difference. Weston let it be known that wasn't acceptable -- not out of malice to the officials who missed the call, but because more people now watch the women's game and need to know that there is accountability.
"I was watching on TV and I called my people at the NCAA and said, `They are not advancing and I want that in the paper that they are not advancing,'" Weston said. "Well, we had never done that before. I thought this was a horrendous misapplication of the rules."
Many were stunned that Weston had taken that step, but she wanted to make clear that those kinds of mistakes didn't go unnoticed.
"We took a lot of heat, but I thought it was the right thing to do," she said. "And what it did is it made everybody go, `Dang, I better get this right. We're not just going to be able to go quietly.' "We're an industry now. We're a business. We're not just playing around anymore."
None of that means that Weston is a stern task-master. She's a friendly woman who loves to use those diplomatic skills to help calm a touchy situation.
And she's just as hard on herself as anybody else.
Weston still recalls a fifth foul she called on Southern California star Cheryl Miller in a regular season game and readily admits that she blew the call and Miller barely touched the other player.
"I had a game of hers like three days later," Weston said. "She walked up to me and I said, `Don't even say it, I'll make sure you get her next time.'
And she said, `How did you know I was going to say that?'And I said, `Because I didn't forget it either.' I didn't.
"Later on in the season, I called a foul on her and she was already turning and going to the bench and the next time she came back on the court she said, `I knew I got that one.' "
Weston is grateful that mistake came in neither an NCAA tournament game nor the deciding final minute. Because then she would have been going against her own mantra.
"This is what I tell officials: There's 39 minutes in a game, if you make a mistake then, they have time to do something else," she said. "If you make a mistake in the last minute, there's not enough time for them to make up for what you did bad. You can't screw up in the last minute of the game. Everybody remembers the end."
Weston also remembers the beginning. Her first paying gig as an official was $5 for a high school game. For many years, she considered breaking even financially to be a good year officiating. When she officiated the 1982 Women's Final Four, she made $250. This year, tournament officials will make $800 per game for the first and second rounds, $950 for the regionals and $1,400 per game in the Women's Final Four.
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Weston demonstrates officiating signals in an era when female referees wore skirts. |
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Officiating women's basketball isn't pocket money anymore, it can be a full-time lucrative job. That's in no small part because of the work that Weston has done.
"It's a good job to be an official, but it's a difficult job," Arizona coach Joan Bonvicini said. "In prior years, there were a handful of good officials. Now there are a lot."
Besides overseeing officiating, Weston helped the game move through rules changes that included the smaller ball and the three-point shot. The women still don't have a 10-second backcourt call like the men do, and it's on this point that Weston still finds a teaching moment or two. As is often the case at a women's game, someone in the crowd yelled for a player to get the ball across halfcourt before the 10 seconds expire. The fan was sitting near Weston, who pointed out that the women don't have that rule.
"He said, `Well, who are you?' " Weston said of the fan who didn't know what to think of her information. "I said, `I helped write the rule book.' "
Now Weston will be writing the next chapter of her own life, hoping her golf game improves and concentrating on her duties at Central Michigan. For now, she'll hang back but will be ready to offer advice if anybody asks for it.
"I think about the days of Marcy Weston and her pleated skirt officiating, that was certainly the early stages," said Ponsetto, who was an assistant coach at DePaul in Weston's officiating days. "I think of that, to where we are now ..."
Yet one thing hasn't changed in all that time, Ponsetto said.
"I really felt she always had the kids' best interests at heart. She always wanted to provide a fair and level playing field," Ponsetto said. "When you make that the focus of how you conduct your business and what you value, you can't go wrong."
