Legendary College Basketball Official Ed Hightower Takes Time to Talk Exclusively with Spartan Nation about College Basketball. Part 1

Legendary College Basketball Official Ed Hightower Takes Time to Talk Exclusively with Spartan Nation about College Basketball. Part 1 Q: Mr. Hightower. How

Legendary College Basketball Official Ed Hightower Takes Time to Talk Exclusively with Spartan Nation about College Basketball. Part 1

Q: Mr. Hightower. How are you?

A: Hondo, thank you. It’s a real pleasure being with you today. It’s a pleasure being with you today.

Q: One of the things I like about you is you love the game. What does the game of basketball mean to Mr. Hightower?

A: First of all, for those fans who really don’t know what I do professionally, Hondo, my real job is education. I’m the Superintendent of the Edwardsville School District. I have 7,500 students. I’ve worked in education for 37 years. It’s all about making life better for young people. And helping young people to achieve the success that they’ve set up for themselves and ultimately the goals of making them 1) a better person and 2) understand what accountability means and 3) trying to do something to help others. That’s what this is all about. I get upset when over the years, and this is probably where the game has changed… When I broke into the Big 10 for example, I broke in at a very early age on a crew at age 28, and that was very, very young back then. I worked my first Final Four at about age 34. Now back then it was about helping the game. If you could help two young people who are in conflict out there on the floor and not have to give them a punitive discipline, meaning a foul or an ejection from the game, that was so well accepted. But nowadays, the commentators, they want to make more of the game than what it’s about. They wanna say it’s about this guy’s trying to make it about them. It’s the same thing with the coaches, this coach is working the official. But at times you can resolve a conflict by calling a couple of individuals together and say, Look. Do you guys wanna play the game? Your team needs you. Your team needs you. Why are you doing that? And if you can help them the coaches appreciate it, the other teammates appreciate it, and certainly the fans appreciate it. Because if you can do that early in the first half then you don’t have to worry about that player getting that extra foul in the second half. Or they have longer to play without being penalized.

Q: We have all seen when you call timeout and pull two players out or go talk to a coach. You did that one time with Drew Neitzel...

A: One of my favorite kids.

Q: You talk to coaches on the side, explaining what’s happening… not yelling at them. That’s part of being an educator. I don’t think you can separate Ed Hightower on the court from being that. Fans can yell at you or call you a showboat, but they fail to understand coaches are thankful.

A: You cannot. And that’s the great opportunity that I have, Hondo. I’m the luckiest guy in the world. I’m the luckiest guy in the world because I have an opportunity to work with young people both at my job… I did my undergraduate work at Southern Illinois University and I’ve since become the Vice-Chair on the Board of Trustees at all of the SIU campuses. I did my doctoral work at St. Louis University and with that I worked on… My dissertation was on extending the day and working with young people. It was about attitude. It was about helping. In my extension from my regular workday to refereeing, there is that extension, there is that strong relationship. I’ll be very blunt. Tom Izzo, I’ll go to Tom and say, Tom I just talked to this guy, whatever the player’s name is, and I just told him. Coaches appreciate that, because the ultimate thing… I have that weapon. I can blow the whistle at any time. But I understand that if I can keep the good players in the game then it makes the game better. The fans come to watch the players, not sit on the bench and get two cheap fouls in the first two minutes of the game. And at times the kids are so revved up they don’t understand what they’re doing. But when you can work and they respond, that’s what this is about. Not watching and not having kids sit on the bench when they don’t have to. That’s the great thing about what I do and I enjoy it immensely.

Q: I know not every coach agrees with every single call an official makes. But I’ve never heard a coach, on or off the record, question your abilities. How has the game of basketball changed over your tenure?

A: Hondo, that’s an excellent question. The game has changed so much. First of all, the athleticism of the players is absolutely incredible from when I first started. I did have the opportunity to play high school basketball. I played in college, I coached basketball. I understand the game. That’s the other thing that I have going for me. I do understand the game, I’ve been around it. I know the agony. I know the emotion. I know the ups and downs that the coaches go through, the players go through. The biggest thing I’ve noticed in the game…there’s so much scrutiny now. The coaches are under so much pressure now because the expectation is so high that they have to win. So that has been a major change in the game in the amount of pressure. The other major changes that I’ve seen…the 3 point has really changed the game, as far as you’re never out of the game. The other thing that’s changed certainly, the shot clock, where you can’t stall the ball. So that’s another major change. Things I would really like to see them do, two things…one, I’d like to see them go and expand the 3 second lane similar to what we have in international basketball. When you’ve got 10 players playing inside of that rectangular area there, it is very difficult with as big as these kids are today, and as agile and as strong, it is tough. So we open it up a little bit, now the players have more maneuverability. The other thing that I would like to see is have the official be able to go to the replay more than what we do. Again, some would say he or she is just trying to get on TV. No, that’s not it. There’s so much riding on the game today, and if you can go to the replay for example on a basket interference goal tending. I had a play a couple years ago, it was against Michigan State and I just knew that we were right at the time on a goal tending. It was at a critical time of the game. If we could have gone to the replay and looked at that situation… And I’m not talking about going to the replay on every play, that is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about at the critical time of the game. When? In the last two minutes you’ve got a situation where you need to check and make sure that you’re 100% right. Why? Because there’s so much riding on that game. It’s not who’s right, but rather what’s right. When you’ve got coaches whose jobs are on the line and you miss that play at the end of the game and you can’t go back and review it, Hondo, that is something we have poor… Now the NCAA has allowed us to go to the replay more, but there are other plays that we should be able to review and I’m hoping at some point that will be done.

Q: You’ve been around a long time. Where do new officials come from? Are you concerned about that?

A: I won’t say the next Ed Hightower, but rather I would say… It’s different today than it was when I started. When I started in basketball I was assigned to a veteran official. I was not allowed to referee all over the country. I was assigned to a veteran referee. There was more observation. There was more training. There was more immediate feedback so you had an opportunity to really develop that young official. Nowadays the younger officials go to camps, and that’s a great thing. There’s video evaluations. I’m not sure that tutorage is there, that mentoring is there like it was when I broke in. Another thing, while I broke into the Big 10 at a very, very young age…28 is a very young age...but I had been working basketball from the time I was in college. I had played the game. I started working when I was a freshman at Southern Illinois University doing intra-mural basketball. I worked the inter-mural. I worked the open city league. I worked the high school. I worked the junior college. I worked my way all the way up so I had a lot of opportunities to fail, to make mistakes and learn without jeopardizing the careers of so many coaches when you go in there as a young guy. And the young people need that opportunity. But the criticism that I have, and not that I’m concerned that they’re gonna take my place, I know when it’s time for me to walk away. And I will. But here’s the thing…so many of the young officials nowadays are coming into the ranks and they have not been tested. If you talk to a coach, that is the coach’s greatest concern. So many young officials coming in today, they come in with the attitude that they should immediately work that championship of the Big 10. They should immediately in their second year go to the final Four. It doesn’t work like that. You have to make mistakes at the lower level, learn from those mistakes, get criticized. When you get criticized and you get that media attention and you can rebound from that, then that is something that you can build that reservoir of experience. But you don’t see that as often as you should, like it used to be. So that is the biggest criticism that I have about the development of young officials now.