How WNBA referees are scouted, trained, and held accountable, explained

The experts overseeing WNBA officiating explain everything you’ve ever wondered about the job in an exclusive sitdown with SB Nation.

Regardless of the sport, the gender, and the moment in time, one thing has always been true: referees are inherently some of the most unpopular characters in sports.

Reeling fans blame officials when calls go against their favorite teams and athletes. Players routinely rail against them after tough losses, particularly those decided by a single call. And, oftentimes, the frustration is rooted in reality — the officials who are supposed to stay out of the way may make costly errors that change the outcomes of games. Still, competitive sports rely on unbiased arbitrators, and referees are the closest thing society has to that.

This past year, the officiating in the WNBA became as hot-button an issue as any. Heated debates surrounding the league’s physicality dominated the headlines, particularly when Indiana Fever star rookie Caitlin Clark was subject to several intentional fouls.

Tensions came to a head in the WNBA Finals’ deciding Game 5, when a controversial last-second foul call on Minnesota Lynx forward Alanna Smith gave the New York Liberty’s Breanna Stewart two free throws, and a chance to send the game to overtime.

The Liberty won it in the extra period, and chaos followed.

“All the headlines will read ‘Reeve cries foul.’ Bring it on. Bring it on,” said Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve after a long-winded rant in which she laid out her grievances with the refereeing. “Because this shit was stolen from us.”

But, as frustrated as many were with WNBA officiating this past season, very little is publicly known about how individuals become WNBA referees, what types of accountability measures are in place when officials mess up, and which decisions are within their jurisdiction — and which are outside of their scope.

So, for this week’s edition of WNBA Explained, SB Nation sat with two of the most experienced people in the basketball officiating world: Monty McCutchen and Sue Blauch.

McCutchen oversees referee development as the senior vice president of referee and training at the NBA, and was previously an NBA referee for almost 25 years. Blauch, the vice president of WNBA referee performance and development, previously served as a WNBA referee for 20 years.

Here’s what we learned in the lengthy conversation.

Let’s start at the top – how does one become a WNBA referee?

Every WNBA and NBA referee’s journey is different, but they all share the same foundation: a stint in the G League. Since 2004, all aspiring officials — regardless of their respective professional backgrounds — must spend time refereeing in the NBA’s developmental league.

However, the journey individuals take to get to the G League varies tremendously from person to person. The NBA oversees a robust referee scouting program that identifies promising young refs from all walks of life and recruits them into an official development program that ultimately funnels into the G League.

“They [scouts] are in high school gyms, they’re in college gyms, they go to NIRSA (National Intramural-Recreation Sports Association) clinics,” Blauch said. “They’re out there looking at a lot of the referees [who are] just getting into it, just getting started.”

(Side note: I played six years of NIRSA basketball at Northeastern University, and will attest first-hand that the referees are top-notch).

Once scouts identify intriguing candidates, they officially invite them into the WNBA and NBA refereeing developmental program.

“They’re invited — based on talent — to attend grassroots candidate evaluation events,” Blauch said. “And, there’s a progression of candidate evaluation events every spring, through the summer, where referees are evaluated, critiqued, and then brought on into the G league each year to start their training.”

McCutchen noted that “talent” extends beyond simply being intuitive about the sport — the league specifically looks for refs who can work well with others to form a complete officiating team.

“We can’t take three independent people from different backgrounds and put them in the highest league in the world in the WNBA, and expect teamwork,” he said.

The result is a pool of diverse officials with diverse backgrounds — some most experienced in high school, some hailing directly from college, and some from NIRSA. All of them subsequently go through the NBA’s developmental program, a structured system that emphasizes referees working in unison.

“While we’re open to talent from anywhere, it is important that they be trained through the mechanic system so that they can be part of something bigger than themselves, which is a team,” McCutchen said.

“It’s a very robust training program that really prepares them for the highest professional leagues in the country,” Blauch said.

Blauch and McCutchen took different pathways to becoming professional referees. Blauch was proactively recruited out of NCAA Division I refereeing, while McCutchen was far more inexperienced, initially drawn to the field due to financial necessity.

“I got started because I was hungry,” he admitted. “Basketball was all I knew.”

Isaiah J. Downing-Imagn Images

So, McCutchen — a substitute teacher at a middle school in Los Angeles at the time — attended a referee meeting at a local college, where he learned that officiating could yield financial opportunity.

“I was like, ‘How much do you make for that?’” he said, reflecting upon a conversation with another young referee. “He told me the per hour, and it was a lot better than what I was making per hour back then.”’

McCutchen didn’t officiate high school or college — only elementary and middle school boys and girls. But, he took a swing at a dream that panned out better than he could have ever imagined.

“I was silly enough, maybe ambitious enough, to sit down and write the NBA a letter saying this is what I wanted to do,” McCutchen said.

That decision ultimately led to an opportunity to attend a referee camp that he couldn’t afford, but was nonetheless eager to make work.

“My dad went and took a loan out against a horse he had, and gave me the money to go to that camp,” McCutchen said.

The rest was history; a successful 20-year NBA officiating career followed.

How the rapid growth of the WNBA has impacted officiating

2024 was a year of unprecedented growth and viewership in the WNBA, a substantial amount of which can be attributed to Caitlin Clark, who took the basketball world by storm after an all-time college career.

But, the season ended with the coaches of the Lynx and the Liberty — Cheryl Reeve and Sandy Brondello,— taking turns railing against the officiating in the WNBA Finals. Officiating, as it has so many times, took center stage in the most high-profile and consequential moment in the sport’s season.

Blauch and McCutchen both noted that as the game has evolved, officiating sometimes lags behind.

“The thing that’s important to note is referees are always slightly behind the innovations of players,” McCutchen said. “Players and teams push boundaries — that’s what makes it great. They dedicate their lives to footwork and the ability to push right up to the line. Refereeing and the Department of Refereeing has to live up to those innovations and that growth.”

This past season, many people criticized referees for the amount of physicality that is a part of today’s WNBA game, urging officials to better protect players who are subject to hard fouls. But as directly as they may be involved, it’s sometimes not (entirely) their call.

“I think sometimes it’s misunderstood that referees make those decisions about the style of play and the interpretations of rules,” McCutchen said. “That’s not true. What actually happens is that we have a competition committee for stakeholders, coaches, governors, and general managers — and that competition committee is the committee that dictates the state of the game.”

One significant point of internal discussion in the league has been legislating screen-setting.

“Because we’re offensively driven, and we have so many screens in our games, we’re constantly making sure that we’re balancing the defenders being able to defend, as well as the offensive players being able to do what they want to do without being illegally impeded, that sort of thing,” Blauch said. “We look at those play types and look to hone in for our training, for our points of education going forward.”

The committee explores things like proper freedom of movement, and balancing offense and defense. They then recommend rule changes and standards to the Board of Governors, which high-profile individuals in WNBA leadership, like Commissioner Cathy Engelbert, are a part of. The referees simply take the agreed-upon rule changes and do their best to implement them.

“It is then our responsibility to make sure that we’re living up to those standards through constant feedback from our stakeholders,” McCutchen said. “That’s what good officiating looks like.”

Blauch and McCutchen don’t think that the WNBA’s officiating is more inconsistent than NBA officiating — instead, they believe that the rapid influx of new eyes simply leads to increased scrutiny.

“I think what happened in the W is that we had exponentially more eyes on WNBA officiating than we’ve ever had, and rightfully so,” McCutchen said. “And, it sort of started to equal the scrutiny that NBA officials have on any given night.”

McCutchen acknowledged that mistakes have certainly been made, as is always the case with officiating. But, at the same time, he believes that some of the concerns are rooted in the reality that the WNBA game is inherently officiated differently than the NCAA.

“Consistency doesn’t mean perfection,” McCutchen said. “We’re human beings who make mistakes. But when you get an exponential new set of eyes on the WNBA, that’s going to bring, to some degree, a lack of understanding of WNBA officiating.”

Blauch — who officiated in the NCAA for 28 years and in the WNBA for 19 years — similarly reiterated that it’s important to understand the substantial difference between the two leagues.

“[The WNBA] is very, very different than 18 to 21-year-olds in college basketball,” Blauch said. “The game is very different — the way they play, the style of play, the strength, their ability to be physical — legally — s very different.”

“If fans haven’t watched the WNBA game, until Angel Reese or Caitlin Clark or Cameron Brink… some of those new players to the league this year, they did have their eyes opened, I’m sure, in a very new way.”

The myth of no accountability for referee mistakes

One of the notions that fans often find frustrating about referees is the perceived lack of accountability they face for costly errors. And while it’s true that referees don’t conduct on-camera postgame interviews, Blauch and McCutcheon noted that there are several accountability measures in place that referees are subject to.

For one, game assignments are generally made based on internal performance evaluations, and given that WNBA referees get paid by game, their total number of assignments is crucial. Playoff assignments, or lack thereof, are another measure of accountability.

Additionally, each referee crew is comprised of three distinct positions: the crew chief, a referee, and an umpire. Umpires are typically the newest referees with the least experience; eventually, most umpires’ goal is to become referees.

“A crew chief — that’s sort of what you strive for as a referee,” Blauch said, noting that the best officials get the opportunity to carry a lot more responsibility for how the game is run and managed.

Photo by M. Anthony Nesmith/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

Referees are constantly receiving online feedback. The league manages an internal website, the Referee Engagement Performance System (REPS), and every single WNBA game is downloaded into this platform with analysis. The Department of Refereeing can also create “playlists” of calls like flagrant fouls for educational purposes, and showcase to referees which calls they got right and which calls they got wrong.

“Each official gets hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of [pieces of] feedback throughout the season, in real-time,” McCutchen said. “They don’t hear from us once every two weeks. They’re hearing from us daily on where improvements need to take place, and that’s a form of real-time accountability.”

Both McCutchen and Blauch believe that fans will always have issues with officiating, regardless of what strides are made in the field.

“I do think that it’s somewhat inevitable,” Blauch said. “Fans are very driven by the success of their team and their favorite players and their star players — and fans are just generally going to look at the game through how things went for their particular favorite player or favorite team. I don’t know that we ever get past that.”

Still, WNBA officials also make a concerted effort to accept criticism of the officiating to improve.

“It’s our responsibility to be confident enough in the work to acknowledge when the criticism is warranted — and therefore we need to get better,” McCutchen said. “The WNBA exploded in popularity for really good reasons. This year, we’re expanding our team base, so the league is really growing. That invites more scrutiny, and more constructive criticism, in terms of making sure that the refereeing department and the staff itself live up to that growth. And it’s our responsibility to know where the work is and where the noise is — but you can’t get to the work if you’re constantly defending bad work out of the principle of trying to be right.”

Another measure of accountability is financial penalties; referees can be subject to fines when certain mistakes are made. However, refs will only face fines for making mistakes classified as “misapplications of rules” rather than typical blown calls. Some examples of fineable mistakes include not allowing a team to challenge when they had a challenge available and awarding a team an incorrect number of free throws.

Incorrect foul calls or out-of-bounds calls are not fineable offenses.

“Judgement is the same as missing a layup,” McCutchen said.

McCutchen declined to share exactly how much fines are — nor what NBA and WNBA officiating salaries are — but he noted that they are a form of “meaningful accountability.”

Still, an undeniable resource disparity exists between WNBA and NBA officiating

Sue Blauch said she does not believe that the WNBA’s officiating is any more inconsistent than the NBA’s.

However, it’s fair to say that are certainly more resources on the NBA’s side. For one, NBA refs are salaried employees with more officiating opportunities, given the fact that their season is 82 games. WNBA referees, meanwhile, get paid per game and typically officiate the NCAA in the offseason. So, while NBA officials will typically only officiate NBA games once they begin with the NBA, WNBA referees have to switch gears throughout the years.

Additionally, while G League basketball is not exactly the same as the NBA’s, it’s inherently more similar to the NBA than the WNBA given the fact that regardless of how you slice it, the NBA and G League are both men’s basketball leagues with overlapping players. So, it’s fair to maintain that the current developmental track is better served to prepare referees for the NBA than the WNBA.

The resource disparity also shows up in several other ways. For example, the day after every slate of regular season games, the NBA issues a Last Two Minute report that delineates every single officiating mistake that was made in the final two minutes “for any game in which one team’s lead over the other is three points or fewer at any point during the last two minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime.”

The WNBA does not have a similar accountability measure at this time due to a lack of resources — but it could explore something similar down the road.

“They take all day to do,” McCutcheon said. “And it’s an enormous amount of headcount within the office, in our independent review system and judging system of plays. And therefore, right now, the WNBA doesn’t have those resources.”

Looking ahead at WNBA officiating

McCutchen maintains that misconceptions and emotions cloud fans’ understanding of officiating. Most big-picture refereeing trends are not actually under the officials’ jurisdiction — but are instead choices the league makes regarding legislating the game.

“People that get involved in refereeing are people that are excited, and driven by, integrity and character and fairness,” McCutchen said. “I know our fanbases don’t feel that, but the characteristics that we see that consistently show up — either in our pipeline or those that make it to the G League and then on to the WNBA and the NBA — all have similar characteristics of fairness and integrity. High-character people.”

“Our mistakes tend to cloud that sometimes because there are mistakes that are very human in nature, [but] are viewed through a prism of desire by our fanbases and our teams, and that leads to some erroneous thoughts about how we approach our work.”

As the WNBA continues to grow, it will continue to improve across the board. We saw efforts to improve coaching across the board this past season, with 7 of 12 head coaches leaving their existing organizations. We’re similarly seeing it with franchises prioritizing getting new practice facilities.

Officiating will inevitably catch up, too.

More games — next season will feature 42 regular season games for each team rather than 40 — means more opportunities for referees. More eyes on the product means more money for everyone involved — and, in turn, more resources. And all that extra experience and financial investment, could ultimately lead to better refereeing, too.

This article is the sixth installment of SB Nation’s new “WNBA Explained” series, a weekly column diving deep into different topics related to women’s basketball. You can read last week’s column about what it’s like to be selected in a WNBA expansion drafted here.