JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Nease freshman Abigail Hardie is taking full advantage of the push to increase the number of female officials in high school, college and the NFL.
“When you start young, your whole path is ahead of you,” North Florida Officials Association vice president Robert Farley said. “You’ve got plenty of time, plenty of opportunity to reach the NFL. There’s a big push right now to get more women in officiating.”
Added Hardie: ”I’ve been told by some of the guys that I shadow that they love to hear like when girls want to get interested in it because there’s not a lot.”
This season, Hardie spent time on the sidelines during the first half of Panthers home games shadowing officials. She’s the first high school student to intern with the North Florida Officials Association (NFOA).
“We struggle to get new officials in every year and to have someone so young interested,” North Florida Officials Association president Sam Maroon said. “It will be a great advantage to her down the road having started so young.”
An obvious football fan, Hardie wanted to be more involved with the game, just like her dad Todd, who also started officiating this year.
“It’s become different now because when we’re watching the game, it’s kind of starting to rub off on my brother,” she said. “Like what we look for and what we’re looking at the screen when we’re watching football. We’ll all say the same thing. We’ll be like ‘oh holding!” Like at the same time. My mom’s like ‘oh my gosh not you too Abigail. Not you too’.”
The problem is that Hardie is too young to become an official. You have to be 16 years old. That’s when Maroon and Farley had the idea to start an internship program. When Maroon worked Nease home games as a line judge, Hardie would stand right behind him watching and learning.
“She and I can have a conversation as the game goes on,” Maroon said. “Me kind of explaining to her ‘hey here is what I’m looking at’. She can ask questions. We kind of have a little bit of a dialogue going on during the game, which is just great.”
At first, it was quite a lot for Hardie to take in. All of the commotion of the game surrounding her. But as the season progressed, so did Hardie’s confidence and knowledge of the rule book.
“As we went through a few games, she became more comfortable and she got much more engaged and you could just see her progression from game to game where she was taking the things that we had talked about in the previous game and building on that,” Maroon said.
Hardie still gets to experience Friday nights as a freshman in high school though. At halftime she went into the stands and cheered for the Panthers with her friends.
“It’s like a double life,” Hardie said. “I’ll be on the sidelines and I’m talking to the officials and talking about like the rules and what they think just kind of like asking questions. Then like I go up to the stands and then I’m screaming because I’m not allowed to scream on the sidelines as an official.”
Now with one season complete, Hardie wants to return next year to do one more internship before she can officially sign up to be an official. While the NFOA hopes to expand the internship to involve more students at other high schools as well.
For more information on becoming an official you can check out NFOA.org