By Mike Woitalla, Soccer America Magazine

A few months after he had refereed in the 1990 World Cup, Vinnie Mauro traveled to Alabama to officiate in the Sun Belt Conference championship together with longtime college refs Ken Andres and Alex Ivanhenko. They bunked at a friend's house and attended his 7-year-old daughter's youth soccer game in the morning. Sure enough, the assigned refs didn't show up, so the youngsters got to play under the watch of what may have been the most experienced refereeing crew ever to officiate a U-8 game.

"After the game, a woman comes up to Vinnie and starts giving it to him," Andres says. "She tells him, 'I don't know where you got your referee license but you sure aren't qualified to referee!'"

For Andres, the story demonstrates one of the main sources of today's referee shortage, which he predicts will become severe in the near future. If one of the United States' top referees gets berated at an under-8 game, imagine what others go through.

Youth soccer stocks its referee corps with officials in their teens. Andres believes that these young referees have to put up with so much abuse from raging parents on the sidelines they don't consider carrying a whistle later in life.

"I have refereed 7- and 8-year-old players who were saying they wished mom or dad didn't go to their games," says Andres, the president of the National Intercollegiate Soccer Officials Association (NISOA). "Youth soccer is supposed to be fun, but instead of it being a great time for the children, parents turn it into another trying social experience that the kids shouldn't have to go through. When I was a kid, soccer was a sanctuary where the world stopped for us, but parents are ruining that and a lot of players who referee youth soccer decide they don't want to put up with it."

That shrinks the pool of potential referees at a time when there's a huge demand.

"We do not have enough referees," Andres says. "It's a big problem. Participation numbers are up; there's been the explosion in the number of women's programs. More games, fewer referees is a prescription for disaster and not too far down the road we will have a dire shortage."

But Andres, who has refereed college soccer for 28 years and has officiated more than 50 collegiate final-four games, makes the case that referees encounter less grief in the college game than at the youth soccer level.

"There's a lot you don't have to put up with at the college level," says Andres. "There is institutional control and conference control."

Andres, 51, grew up in the soccer hotbed of Trenton, N.J., and in 1974 captained Swarthmore College when it reached the NCAA Division III final. He is the first person to have played and refereed in a national college final. Upon entering Ohio State law school, he figured that the only way he could stay involved in college soccer while practicing law was to referee."

(This article is provided courtesy of Soccer America Magazine. For subscription information, go to http://www.socceramerica.com or call 1-800-997-6223.)