• The amateur basketball referees will not participate in weekend games to mark their protest at the upsurge in violent behavior towards them.

  • They denounce recurring threats and intimidation during meetings.

  • The referees hope to trigger “collective awareness” through their action.

They mean stop.

Basketball amateur championship matches will be played this weekend without a referee in Haute-Vienne, due to an upsurge in violent acts against them, we learned from the departmental committee on Friday.

The basketball referees "declare themselves worried about the situation, they fear for their safety", can we read in a press release published on the committee's website.

The strike will concern departmental, interdepartmental and regional meetings organized from Friday to Sunday.



"These are threats, intimidation", often perpetrated against young referees, said Friday Patrick Pelletier, president of the departmental committee of Basket 87. "There is a lot of incivility coming from parents", while matches of less 17 and 15 years old "are refereed by kids of the same age as their children".

The latter cannot explain this unprecedented increase in violence: “We did not have that before”, he specifies.

50% of referees stop after their first year

At the beginning of November, a young referee was notably slapped by supporters, after having been noticed filming a meeting where two of his colleagues were themselves insulted.

The situation pushes some to want to quit.

The department has 52 referees, in form each year "between 25 and 30 and we lose half of them the following season", laments Patrick Pelletier.

Each receives compensation of 25 euros per match, "but you are not going to be insulted" for this sum, he adds.

"I'm not saying that's the lot of all clubs, but young people are afraid," continues Patrick Pelletier, who indicates that the situation is the same in other departments.

Through this action, the Haute-Vienne committee hopes to generate collective awareness: “They will see the difficulty” in arbitrating, believes its president.

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