“Hey Ref! You’re making calls out of your aaass!” the father of a nine-year-old kid in a game I was officiating yelled at me at the top of his lungs, adding a two-handed, open-palm slam against the glass for emphasis.

Handing off the puck to my officiating partner, I skated to my designated position, which happened to be a spot on the ice fairly close to where that parent stood, still pressed against the glass. Slowly, deliberately, I leaned forward with my hands on my knees, focusing on the impending puck-drop—and giving that parent a good look at the region from which my calls were coming.

Before then, I’d done a variety of side jobs to supplement my writing income, like teaching fitness classes and acting as a mystery shopper for Whole Foods (before it was obtained by the company with a curved penis logo). I’d acted as an extra several times, most notably on the TV series Breaking Bad and then Better Call Saul. But, by far, the most unique of those jobs was working as a USA Hockey ice hockey official.

Officiating involved a lot of skating, and I needed the practice. I hadn’t grown up ice skating. When I was a kid living in Denver, Colorado, I had skated a handful of times, but then I moved to Florida for high school and college and, after that, I chose Albuquerque, New Mexico, as my home base. Even with its Double-A professional team era or two, Albuquerque wasn’t a hockey hotbed. But, eventually, a co-ed adult beginner ice hockey league formed, and my husband and I signed up. About a year later, my husband lured me into registering for officiating camp.

Intrigued friends wondered what could sway me to become “law enforcement.” No one likes people who penalize; your player friends no longer trust you, acquaintances are guarded around you. My mom wasn’t keen on the idea after I shared stories of coaches, parents, and fans yelling at officials. “I don’t want you to be in such a hostile environment,” she said. “I don’t like people directing so much anger at you.”

At the time, I was reading retired NFL player Dhani Jones’s book, The Sportsman. In it, he wrote, “If you want to make real gains in your life, you’re going to have to put yourself in uncomfortable situations. Places where you feel like you’re outnumbered or unliked.” (Years later, Brené Brown would talk about choosing courage over comfort and, again, that would resonate with me.) That inspired me as part of a character quality that I was striving to develop. I wanted to be resilient against criticism. Now, I question the part about putting yourself in places where you feel unliked, but, back then, I hadn’t developed a strong sense of my own needs and was prone to hitch onto challenges.

Officiating fit the bill. Ideally, it would serve as a personal growth experiment and an opportunity to develop the skills and mettle to stick up for myself—another trait I was intentionally working on—and in a hostile environment. That I would be uncomfortable and unliked was a given.

My officiating memories come back to me as micro stories, glimpses into my trial-by-fire, years-long experience. When I attended my first annual USA Hockey Officials clinic, I was the only female. I was thirty-four-years-old but the height of a nine-year-old. (I’m still short.) A few of the other participants were guys from the adult hockey league and the rest were teenage boys. I tried to be inconspicuous as we practiced skating drills, listened to a lecture, and took a written test. The instructors worked to toughen us up by occasionally yelling like a player’s parent or team’s coach may during a game. That experience came in handy the day I worked my first regional tournament—the one where the calls weren’t coming out of my mouth.

I officiated various levels of the co-ed adult league in addition to several age groups of kids. I witnessed how, in game situations, adults could regress to the immaturity of younger children and kids could exhibit the poise and wisdom of adults.

Before one game, a nine-year-old player asked me my height and I told her I was just under five-foot. I asked her for her height, and she replied, “I’m four-foot-ten.” I said, “Yep, that’s pretty close to my height,” and when she said, “You’re four-eleven?” I answered, “Yep.” I told her that now I would have to say I was the height of a nine-year-old. “It’s okay. You don’t have to be normal to be cool,” she said with enviable wisdom. I felt like I had waited my whole life to believe that.

Another memory is how one titillated adult player had repeatedly told me, “You look stunning in stripes.” But I wasn’t ready to call out sexist references to my gender. Several men in the adult league had told me they thought female officials were hot (plainly fantasizing about being disciplined). That annoyed me, but in those days—the early noughties—I was unwilling to draw attention to myself by submitting a complaint. Back then, a lower-level offense felt too minor to react to in a public way. Once, as I was making my way to the ice for my next game, a Mite player (no older than seven) approached me, put his arm around me, let his hand drift down to my bum, then gently placed his other hand on the crest of my jersey (near my breast), and asked, in as smoldering a voice as a seven-year-old could muster, “Do you like being a referee?” I was gobsmacked.

Other experiences were heartening. Most Bantam-level players (twelve to thirteen-year-olds) were taller than me and they were allowed to body check, so officiating their games could be intimidating. I’d been an official for less than two months at my first Bantam game, and my puck drops weren’t always precise. By that age, they would notice it. I worried the boys would make critical comments about my developing skills at face-offs and that, by being vastly outnumbered, I wouldn’t have the mettle to respond. Not having kids of my own, and having been bullied when I was one, made me internally skittish in those moments. Once, with trepidation, I walked down to the ice where a team was waiting and I overheard, “Hey! Cool! I’ve never been reffed by a girl before!” Two players held out their gloves to shake my hand. I wanted to hug them.

Before my third season, my assigning supervisor asked me, “Are you ready to be wrong half the time and confused the other half?” I squinted and twisted my mouth. He responded by quoting an officiating handbook:

Good referees don’t come out of the package that way. It’s an educational and growth process. Judgment is not exact science. For an official, judgment goes hand in hand with experience and working knowledge. Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from making good and bad decisions. Working knowledge comes from using your judgment and experience history to grow and develop.

That sounded to me like a recipe for an intentional life. And for having self-compassion after doing new and unfamiliar activities and making embarrassing, somewhat consequential mistakes in the process. It was the perfect explanation of officiating. That didn’t keep me from appreciating what officiating a good game did for my ego, but I’m too much of an empath to have relished the power. I was also raised by a mother who repeatedly told me I was exceptional until she recognized me getting smug enough to use my insight to protect myself from her. With that, she retracted her praise, leaving me with uncertainty. I loved being an exception on the ice, but when a player disputed my call, it was challenging for me not to obsess over it.

As my officiating confidence and experience increased, it became easier to not take criticism personally. Let me rephrase that: I learned to appear as if I didn’t take criticism personally. I could remain aware and in control of my surroundings in the face of stress, adversity, and near-chaos. If someone said something particularly scathing that caught me off guard, that night I would lie awake for hours, replaying the incident along with what I could have said or done in my defense. I had overheard victory tales from the older generation of officials. I wondered if those older guys were really that sitcom-clever on the spot, or if their stories represented wishful re-creations to give the rest of us comic relief and the hope that one day, if we stuck with it, we might experience our own day of best-ever-comeback glory.

A bartender at our neighborhood restaurant once said that a patron’s son had leaned in to say of me, “I think I recognize that woman down there. She used to ref our hockey games and she was tough.” I had preferred to be proactive about my on-ice persona. One of my officiating partners had claimed that something about me compelled most people to straighten up and behave. My husband called me a toe-keeper-oner. Being both a player and an official, I strove to operate from an empathetic standpoint. But I took seriously my duty to create a safe environment.

Seven years into my officiating career, I figured I had learned what I could in that setting; I was ready to move on from the hostility. But after I stopped officiating, in that same neighborhood restaurant, a new bar manager was hired. “I know you two,” he said to my husband and me. “You guys used to ref.” He nodded in my direction and added, “I remember the time I was trying to clear the puck and you yelled at me, ‘Watch your officials!’ Like I knew what I was doing—I could barely skate! I was just trying to clear the puck.”

In that moment, I laughed it off like I’d done so many times before, but I was out of practice. In the following days, I recreated the situation in my head trying to decide why it mattered. I didn’t remember the player as such, but I remembered the situation. His clearing of the puck had involved slinging it toward my head. As officials, we wore half-shield visors to cover our eyes and noses, but not our mouths (that would impede whistle-blowing). Watching the puck fly toward my face, I had recognized the danger. I hadn’t cared how long he’d played hockey. What I had yelled to him was exactly what my seasoned officiating partner had yelled to a player in my defense during a kids tournament in my early days, before I had the experience to interpret the subtleties of a game.

A few days after my conversation with the bar manager, it hit me: the significance of my yelling at him was that in that moment, I had been confident and experienced enough to stick up for myself.

I asked my husband to take photos of me officiating my final game. In my favorite one, I’m poised between two men who are hunched a little more than they would be otherwise, both about a foot-and-a-half taller than I am. I’m looking down at the face-off circle and instructing them. I’m wearing eyeliner and my nails are painted. You can’t see it in that photo, but I’m wearing my hair in ponytails. For that game, I had chosen to accentuate the characteristics about me that I had spent the past seven years obscuring, and it was a blast.

-Sonya Ewan

Sonya Ewan is a retired USA Hockey ice hockey official and has contributed to national magazines Women’s Health and The Hockey News, writing an immersive feature about the Central Hockey League Officials Training Camp for the latter. She was a regular contributor to Albuquerque The Magazine, East Mountain Living, and the Albuquerque Journal. She holds a BA in psychology and has completed master’s coursework in cultural anthropology. In 2020 she relocated from Albuquerque to Minneapolis, where she lives with her husband and four air-purifying plants and can skate outdoors.