What It Takes: Intramural Officiating

Beyond the DI matchups at the University of Maryland’s varsity fields and stadiums, nearly 8,000 other Terps are dunking and diving for balls and sprinting to score.

They are UMD’s intramural competitors, suiting up annually to take on each other in sports ranging from flag football to futsal.

Joining those teams on the turf is another student crew calling the shots.

All the team intramural sports that University Recreation and Wellness offers are officiated by students; around 200 wear the whistle each academic year. Many of those Terps also play the sports themselves, though no experience is required.

“There’s such a wide variety of ability levels and knowledge bases that we work with,” said Julie Johnson ’18, assistant director for intramural sports and Reckord Armory.

She joined Nyindu Kabangu Jr., coordinator for intramural sports and camps, and Amari Harrington ’26, a student official and intramural supervisor, to give Maryland Today the play-by-play on the training to become a referee, the poise required to handle indignant players who don’t agree with their calls, and the highlights of being part of the “third team on the field.”

Johnson: I mostly work with the participant side of things, managing the scheduling. I was an official for some recreational sports when I was a high schooler and found officiating on campus in intramural sports as a student at UMD and got involved that way.

Harrington: This is my third year as a supervisor, where I help develop and evaluate officials. I played one game of flag football and got an email from intramural sports about officiating, and I was just looking for a job at the time. I watched football all my life, played basketball, so I was like, “Why not?”

Kabangu: My role is primarily facilitating the training and development of the officials, as well as scheduling. I started at UMass Amherst when I was an undergrad. It’s definitely a great opportunity for students to get more involved.

Submitting the Google form that’s on our website is like submitting their application, and then coming to training is basically like a multiday interview. We’ll teach them the rules and give them pointers on how to effectively be an official, effectively manage conflict. We have both classroom and practical learning for about 10 hours total. Then we’ll have a night of scrimmages where we reach out to the participants and get them to play a game and make it like live game action, where we can walk through different things that will occur often. When the regular season starts, our supervisors will give them feedback, both verbal and written, at halftime and the end of the game. We also have weekly meetings.

Johnson: We get a lot of students that have never seen the sport that they’re trying to officiate. We do our best to break it down in as simple of terms as possible. For example, we just finished our flag football training, and on night one, one of the things we cover is what is a down: How many downs do you get? What’s a touchdown? We build on that throughout the training time. We consider the regular season an extension of training.

Harrington: Participants always think they’re right. They’re trying to win, so there are emotions involved. You just have to, as an official, have that self-control to not react or respond in a negative way. It’s just having the confidence in knowing that the call I made is the right call in that moment. Even though they might be yelling at me, be respectful to them, because we do want to give them a good experience.

Kabangu: A lot of our staff plays in games, so they know what it might feel like to be participating in a game where they don’t feel the officiating is up to par. Having that empathy for other participants is a big thing.

Johnson: I just want to remind people that they’re students, and they’re trying their best. Just like players miss shots, officials are going to miss calls, but they don’t intend to do that ever. Officiating is hard—I don’t think people realize that.

Harrington: It’s something I want to continue to do after I graduate. I officiate high school basketball outside of intramurals, and hopefully I’ll get to the college level within the next year or so. There’s a lot of life skills that you learn from being an official at RecWell. Timeliness is one. Just checking emails, responding to emails, communication with your peers and bosses.

Johnson: We go back to the early 2000s with a pretty good streak of having an All-American almost every year, and there are only 10 named nationally each year. And we’ve had several officials from our program go on to be Division I and professional-level officials as well. Right now, we have three in the NBA and one in the NFL.

Harrington: The people you meet here are some of the best people you’ll ever meet. It’s not something I would’ve thought going in, but you make some really great friendships as an official.

Kabangu: Because of us being what we call the third team on the field and having to deal with a lot of adversity in terms of building the confidence to even make a call, seeing a call, dealing with somebody yelling at you, all those sorts of things, I feel like that strengthens the community even more than just working together.

This is part of a series that looks behind the scenes at “what it takes” to keep the University of Maryland humming and create a vibrant campus experience. Got an idea for a future installment? Email kshih@umd.edu.