Mark DiPirro,
Durham, NH
Back when I played club soccer for an organization called the World Cup, I had an African American coach. Our team was pretty strong, and our coach was very passionate about us winning. One day we had a game against another strong team and our ref was an older white gentleman. The game started and we noticed a lot of the calls seemed to be against us, and these same calls were not being equally called for on the opposing side. Whatever our team was used to getting bad refs, so we continued playing our game and kept up in the game. Our coach was getting progressively frustrated by the unfairness and decided to call the ref out on it, to which the ref deemed enough of an excuse to give our coach a yellow card and tell him that more complaints would result in a red. For starters, this was a club, so seeing something like this was rare to begin with. We continued to play and although every call was unfair and against us, we were still the better team. The game was tied, one of my teammates was on a breakaway, dribbled by the defenders and slotted a goal into the back of the net. We were thrilled! The ref blew his whistle, said it was no goal.
All of us were completely dumbfounded. We couldn’t imagine how it wouldn’t be a goal. His explanation was that the goal scorer had his socks down too low. This was both ridiculous and infuriating. Our coach went off on the ref this time and gave him a real piece of his mind. The ref then red-carded our coach and sent him off the field. At this point, we didn’t have a coach and if my memory serves me right, one or a few of the parents stepped in to fill his place. We ended up scoring again, and then had a penalty called unfairly on us once more to tie it up. I don’t remember the final outcome of that game, but later on, many people filed complaints about this ref and he was relieved from his job. Yes, this is a true story about a game against the racist ref who ended up being a more difficult opponent than the opposing team. Racism is never okay and never wins.
TLDR – I had a racist ref who called fouls against us the whole soccer game because of our African American coach. He ended up calling a goal back and throwing my coach out. We still managed to play a good game and the ref was later fired. This was a game against the racist ref.
