Amanda Conlon never pictured herself wearing a striped shirt, blowing a whistle and throwing a yellow flag on a patch of green turf on Friday nights in the fall.
This, despite the fact that she grew up watching her father, Mike, go off to officiate high school football games for just about all her life.
Then last year, while she was watching her alma mater Ohio State play Penn State on television, she second-guessed a holding penalty, noting that because it didn’t impact the play, it shouldn’t even have been called.
“That’s when I realized I might do this,” the 27-year-old Kennedy Township resident recalled.
In short order, she called her father – a 60-year-old retired Kennedy Township police officer who has been officiating high school games for 26 years – and asked him how she could get started.
Fast-forward a year later, and the two Conlons now find themselves in a most unique spot – they’re the only father-daughter officiating team in the WPIAL this football season.
Amanda Conlon, one of four WPIAL female football officials, said she always respected her father’s decision to devote his Friday nights to officiating high school football games.
“But the concept of being an official never crossed my mind,” she said.
Given her father’s avocation, it’s no surprise that she knew a little about the game, but she didn’t gain a true interest in football until she began attending Ohio State, where she majored in chemical engineering. Still, it wasn’t until this year that she transitioned from watching games on TV to roaming the fields during youth league and high school games.
Although Amanda Conlon allows that she’s having fun, it’s certainly no walk in the park. She said sometimes things happen on the field so fast that it can be overwhelming.
“You can only read the rulebook so much,” she said. “It’s different seeing it in person. A couple plays have happened so quickly – I knew what to do, but you can get so flustered just seeing it.”
Still, she looks at those types of plays and others as learning experiences.
“You see a play that you’ve never seen before, and you try to put it in your memory bank so that if anything similar happens again, you won’t get flustered and you’ll know what to do,” she said.
Still, she said she enjoys officiating and she’d like to continue doing it next year. She plans to spend time after the season studying and watching training videos. “I need to get more exposure to games even when it’s the offseason,” she said.
“I never look at an official as being a woman or a man, I look at them as officials. But father and daughter did fine. I didn’t notice them, which is what you want.”
– Nick Morea, director and former WPIAL officiant
Amanda Conlon said she looks at her new endeavor as another challenge to face – and at the same time it’s a break from the stress of her work as a project engineer at a gene therapy business.
“It is stressful in its own way, but I’m the one who puts stress on myself,” Amanda said of her new hobby. “I’m still learning and want to make sure I get the plays right – to make sure I do the right mechanics and watch the right keys.”
Amanda Conlon said it’s also helpful from the standpoint of personal development off the field.
“You have to get used to explaining your logic about why you made a decision or didn’t make a decision about a call the coaches are asking for,” she said. “Sometimes the emotions run high, and you have to learn how to de-escalate things. It’s good for developing personal skills.”
It helps to have a veteran official in the family when it comes to fine-tuning her officiating game.
“I never played the sport – I’m still in year one, and I’m still learning the judgment calls,” she said. “It’s nice to be able to go to him later and say, ‘This is what I saw, should I have thrown the flag?’ And then him saying, ‘No, you shouldn’t have – that was a good no-call.’
“It’s fun to talk to him later and know that you’re making progress.”
Her father concurs that his daughter is indeed making progress after officiating more than 50 games at the youth and high school levels this year.
“Just like everyone who starts out, it’s very difficult,” he said. “Just understanding the mechanics and being in the right place – all of that.”
For their first high school game, the Conlons officiated a tight contest between Hampton and Obama Academy. Amanda had a few “bumps in the road,” as Mike puts it, but they’ve continued to work on her mechanics and the other aspects of her game by watching film and diving deeper into the rulebook.
“Everything she did, she did pretty well for a first game,” Mike said. “But she wasn’t polished – and she won’t be polished for another three to five years until she understands everything.
“But each week she’s improved. We’ve tried to correct one thing and then move on to the next. It’s like learning your ABCs – it’s all building blocks. Every time she hit a bump in the road, we looked at it and I told her how to get over that bump in the road. And she did. I told her, ‘Look, you’ve really come a long way since that first game.’”
Amanda said it wasn’t all that difficult to get certified as an official. She had to learn the rules, pass a test and register with a local officials chapter to study the mechanics of officiating and to learn how to apply the rules. Nick Morea, who represents the WPIAL’s male officials on the WPIAL Board of Directors, said he welcomes Amanda Conlon and any other woman who would like to become a WPIAL official.
“I think it’s great,” he said of Amanda Conlon working with her father. “We need more younger officials, and if that’s a way we can grab them – father bringing daughter – that’s great.”
Morea, a longtime official who no longer actively officiates games, said he watched the Conlons in a recent game at McKeesport. And while he conceded that Amanda is “still young and has a long way to go,” he also said both she and her father did nice work.
“I never look at an official as being a woman or a man,” Morea said. “I look at them as officials. But father and daughter did fine. I didn’t notice them, which is what you want.”
Morea said he’s seen a number of WPIAL officials move on to officiate at the college level. It’s not easy, but it can be done.
Amanda Conlon said she hasn’t heard many comments from coaches or players about the fact she’s one of only a small handful of female officials doing WPIAL games – compared with nearly 550 male officials.
“People now are going through the process of watching tape and film to help them get better,” he said. “Others who don’t might stay where they’re at. It’s like anything in life – if you want to get better, you get better. It’s all on the effort you put together.”
In addition to officiating high school games, Amanda also takes her whistle to youth league games. There, she has to “key” on more players since the officiating crews are smaller. Typically, in a high school game, she serves as a side judge and must key on the wide receivers and defensive backs to make sure no one is holding or interfering. In a youth league game, she has those responsibilities as well as watching for holding on the line of scrimmage.
“You have to be able to adjust a little more and a little more quickly in the youth games,” she said. “Also, the players are still learning the game and they’re making mistakes you don’t see in high school games. It’s a good opportunity for me.”
Morea said the speed of the game is a major difference between youth and high school competition. “And they throw all over the place,” he said of some high school teams. “And you have to be able to follow your keys the whole game.”
Mike Conlon said it simply takes time to get to the point where you can react quickly – yet still process things correctly – when you see an infraction that needs to be called.
“When you’re back there and you see pass interference, you have to pull your flag and throw it – automatically,” he said. “That is where you have to strive to be. I know exactly where my bean bag and flags are on my belt. I can pull out a flag and whale it in a heartbeat. You have to get used to being a gunslinger – to pull out that flag and throw it in a heartbeat.”
Although Mike Conlon has been officiating high school games for more than two decades, he’s still working to improve every week. As he says, his next perfect officiating performance will be his first.
“Like anything else, we’re all human,” said Mike Conlon, who’ll be officiating the Peters Township-Baldwin game with his daughter Friday night. “What we try to do is minimize our mistakes. You want to walk off the field and have no one know we were there. That’s how we like to feel.”
Still mistakes are made – a missed block in the back or holding call that led to a big gain – and Mike Conlon admits he has a hard time letting it go after the fact.
“I still go through that today,” he said. “You try to have the perfect game. And then you go through your mind saying, ‘I should have gotten that call.’ Those are the things you keep on striving to improve and to get better each week. Even now, after 26 years, I still do.”
Mike Conlon said while he’s improved his game over the years, it’s still a challenge to apply the rules and explain to a coach why he interpreted a specific rule a certain way. For example, if there’s a running play and the coach is yelling for a holding call, Conlon said he must explain to the coach that, while there was holding going on, it was not at the point of attack.
“The hold meant nothing to the play except that little Johnny was holding little Bobby,” he said. “It was on the other side of the field and had nothing to do with the play. So it’s a matter of communication with the rules. And coaches don’t want to hear what you have to say sometimes. No matter what, you’re always wrong. Fifty percent of the time, one coach loves the call and the other one thinks you stink.”
Amanda Conlon said she hasn’t heard many comments from coaches or players about the fact she’s one of only a small handful of female officials doing WPIAL games – compared with nearly 550 male officials.
“Sometimes during youth games, an 8-year-old will stop and stare at me when I’m on the field,” she said. “They’ll completely turn around and stare at me. I don’t say anything. I just make sure their mouthpieces are in and help them with their knee pads.”
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