Melcher-Dallas school teacher started podcast about refereeing.
By Jenna Mickey
SUN, DEC 24, 2023
Melcher-Dallas, IA –
A Melcher-Dallas school teacher with a long officiating career now co-hosts an officiating podcast.
Jim Crozier; athletic director, at-risk coordinator, 8th grade history teacher, and golf coach for Melcher-Dallas High School, started a podcast about officiating in November of 2023. The podcast, Three Blind Refs, was created to provide information about basketball officiating. It releases biweekly at 7:00pm CST.
Crozier has been officiating for 27 years total and took a couple years off in between to coach basketball. He started in 1985 when he was just a sophomore in college to “make some extra spending money” he said. His best officiating memory was being able to officiate both a girls and a boys state championship game in the same year.
Last year, Crozier and his two partners, Ben Applegate and Sam Anker, talked about starting a podcast. Crozier said “The reason why we wanted to do it was because we thought we had some information that we thought we could give to young officials to try to get more officials into officiating because we’re at a shortage of officials right now”. One of the men posted a tweet asking if anyone would like to see three referees talk about officiating and they got some positive feedback so they started it in November of this year with the help of Three Beards Media, their producer.
In the podcast, the men talk about any new rules, a recap of the games they reffed the week before and what might’ve come up during the game. Crozier said, “We have what we call Fool’s Rules, which are rules that people in the stands and sometimes even coaches don’t even understand”. They discuss “Fools Rules” on the podcast so more people can understand the rules and when they apply.
The podcast has been successful so far and the men have received lots of positive feedback. Other officials have posted telling other people to check out the next episode. Many people have expressed to them what topics they like or they would like to hear more of in upcoming episodes.
Future plans for the podcast include bringing more guest speakers on to talk about different things to widen the audience. One guest speaker they’ve already had was Chuck Brittain who is the coordinator of officials for the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union. They also want more young people to become interested in officiating. Crozier said, “Right now the average age of an Iowa High School official is 58. I’m 58 and I should not be the average age of the Iowa high school official. I should be on the upper end of that. So we need more younger kids into this program and that’s what we’re hopefully trying to do”.
You can find and listen to Three Blind Refs on Spotify, X, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, and Facebook. Follow the links for more: https://www.facebook.com/events/739804654246379/?ref=newsfeed