A familiar face in women's basketball officiating will have a new role with the WNBA. The league announced Wednesday that longtime referee Sue Blauch is now head of WNBA referee performance and development.
It's a position created this year as part of a process to fully consolidate the evaluation and management of officials in the NBA, WNBA and G League, according to NBA vice president Monty McCutchen, who is head of referee development and training, supervising officials in all three leagues.
"In our three leagues, we need to have one brand of officiating," McCutchen said. "We wanted the administration of that to show that our money was where our mouth was. If we were going to say they were all equal, we needed the resources and people in place that equitized all three leagues. And that we have a supervisor of officials for each league."
McCutchen said he approached Blauch about the job earlier this year, and she wanted to take some time to be sure she was ready to step away from full-time officiating.
Blauch, 53, has been an official for women's college basketball for nearly three decades and has officiated in the WNBA and international competitions for the last 20 years. She has worked two Women's Final Fours and the WNBA Finals since 2005.
"I had not planned on coming off the floor for probably another three to five years, so it took a lot of thought," Blauch said. "I had to decide if I could give up both the WNBA and NCAA officiating. The more conversations we had ... I started considering whether this was the right time to serve the game in a different capacity.
"And it really started to make a lot of sense with the culture that's being developed in leadership with officiating. I saw the commitment from [the NBA] to the WNBA in terms of resources and energy."
George Toliver, the father of Washington Mystics player Kristi Toliver, has the same role for the G League.
Blauch will evaluate by watching WNBA games remotely and attending them in person. She'll be giving regular feedback to the 31 officials (now minus Blauch) who work WNBA games and will review their game reports.
During the offseason, she'll be doing competition committee meetings, curriculum development and planning, and scouting for referees. The current WNBA referee pool is made up of officials who work both in NCAA basketball and the G League.
McCutchen and Blauch also addressed some of the officiating issues that players, coaches and fans have noted in the WNBA this season and in general. As for what has seemed like the increased number of technical fouls called in recent weeks, both emphasized that this was simply about enforcing consistent standards from game to game.
Dallas center Liz Cambage, who has six technicals this season, said during a recent teleconference that she felt like the officials were trying to take away anything that seemed emotive from the players, but McCutchen said that is not the case.
"We haven't messaged a single time this year that we want more technicals or we have a problem that we have to take care of," McCutchen said. "I love the passion that our players in the WNBA provide their franchises, the fan base, and the basketball world at large. I think it's a model for how to care about what you've dedicated your life to.
"But I do believe it's important that standards that have long been upheld, and created by our competition committee in past years, are indeed upheld. Our officials aren't just out there punitively handing out [technicals]. ... We want to maintain good game decorum so the focus is on the players. There is no desire to adjudicate passion out of our game."
As for video reviews that sometimes seem to prolong the final minutes, McCutchen said it's important to "get things right."
He also acknowledged that without a centralized replay center like the NBA has, the process is reliant on courtside monitors in the WNBA. Because several WNBA teams do not play in NBA arenas, the technology is not yet in place to have a leaguewide replay center. At some point in the future, however, McCutchen would like to see that.
"We're constantly trying to balance that desire to get the play right up against killing the flow of a game," McCutchen said. "We want to maintain the flow we have, while still not turning away too early, only to find out later that we could have gotten it right if we'd taken 15 more seconds to see it from the last angle.
"We want the coaches and players to feel that the technology serves them, and not detracts from them."