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Tuesday was a typical day in my "Breakfast Club."
At 5:45 A.M. at Rodman Arena in Walpole, I had one of the finest women referees working college and international hockey skating to get ready for this season. We had a veteran Men's Hockey referee who has worked the NCAAs and The ECAC Championships, two imported linesmen who can both skate, one from Siberia and the other from the Ukraine, both played College Hockey and one played in the AHL, ECHL and FHL.
We also had three newbies on hand: two young men, one age 14, another age 15 and one 16-year-old young lady. They were all skating and learning all the little things on how to be an ice hockey official.
Additionally, we had Ryan Daisy, a very promising six-foot-seven linesman who is slated to work 40/40 in the AHL and NHL this season.
They all were at The Breakfast Club on the same day; officials one and all. A big thank you goes out to Rodman Arena for allowing us this privilege of trying to make the art of officiating better.
I say "art" because officiating, much like the coveted concept of "hockey sense" really is as much about art as science. It's situational. It's psychological. It's emotional. There's only so much than be legislated and written into the Rule Book, which tends to get convoluted, counter-intuitive and self-contradictory in places.
I have said this many times before, and have also retold the following story many times: The best advice I ever got about officiating methodology and striking the balance between a player's mentality and a referee's mentality was given to me by the late Hockey Hall of Fame inductee Frank Udvari, who passed away two years ago.
Frank pulled me aside one night and told me, "Don't just read the rule book and then referee by the book. Put your skates on and referee by the feel. If a player did it to you and you'd be angry, that's a penalty. If he did it to your teammate and you want to go fight the guy, that's a penalty. If you were sitting on the bench and your teammate was doing it to an opponent and you would ask yourself, 'What the hell was that?', then that's a penalty."
For the rest of my career, I focused on refereeing by feel and by taking the temperature of the game. Hockey sense became an area where I felt my playing background, which included time in the NHL and WHA, gave me an advantage over some other guys.
Young players and coaches would benefit themselves by doing some officiating themselves. They would learn to think the game differently and it would boost their knowledge base. At the same time, I think the ranks of officials would benefit from having more people who played the game.
The truth of the matter is that we have a hard time recruiting people to become officials and then to get enough of those who do try it to stick with it. Apart from the technical aspects, skating ability, physical fitness, strong positioning and Rule Book knowledge, this job demands a combination of athleticism, psychology, courage and mental toughness that few people possess.
That is the right stuff. The more we strive to identify and cultivate it, the better the art of officiating will be along with the technical side of the profession.
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Paul Stewart holds the distinction of being the first U.S.-born citizen to make it to the NHL as both a player and referee. On March 15, 2003, he became the first American-born referee to officiate in 1,000 NHL games.
Today, Stewart is the director of officiating for the ECAC. He has been with the ECAC since 2007.