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By Kristin Pedroja
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 It’s cutthroat time. You’ve been on the court for an hour and a half, burned through a couple thousand calories and lost five pounds in water weight. Now you find yourself serving for the match leading 8-7 in the fifth. Your opponent hits a loose return along the backhand wall that you jump all over. Seeing that your opponent hasn’t cleared sufficiently, you call “let” and pump your fists, because you’ve just won. Wait a minute. That voice. You’ve heard it too many times throughout the match. And this time it says, “Yes, let.” “What? How was that a let? He was standing right in front of me!”
Damn ref, you think. He was blind. Biased. Looked away during a crucial moment. It’s easy to blame everything that happens during a match on the referee. These referees—they’re ignorant. They’re out to get you. And they’re the most abused component of any sport, including squash.
Refereeing tops the list of players’ least favorite parts of squash. Too negative, too tedious, too boring. Not true, says Rod Symington, World Squash Federation (WSF) referee and guru when it comes to the rules of squash. Symington has spent fifteen years devoting his life to the art of refereeing. He has rewritten the rules to make them more comprehensible to the average player. He’s conducted hundreds of clinics. He is a presence at every major world and North American event possible. And he loves it.
Some would call Symington a masochist. He voluntarily devotes all of his spare time to watching pros and amateurs dance around the court, commit violations and yell at him when he makes a call—not to mention criticism from the crowds. Symington chuckles about his devotion to the darker side of squash. “We’re maniacs,” he says of he and his colleagues.
“If they believe you’re confident, they’re less likely to mess with your decisions.” So what if he gets it wrong? “At the top levels, it’s never ‘wrong.’ It’s marginal.”
Life for Symington is busy, yet satisfying. Head of the Germanic Studies Department at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, he sets his own class schedule and can get away to go to tournaments whenever he pleases. He loves living in the charming town of Victoria, on Vancouver Island, some forty miles from the tip of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. “Squash is huge out here,” he says, noting that Victoria has more competent referees per capita than anyplace else in North America. Living on the island also gives him a chance to see his sons, ages 13 and 10, who live on a nearby island with their mother. He’s lived in Victoria for thirty years, and it seems that isolated island life keeps Symington balanced, yet close enough to the game he loves.
 Symington was “a keen player” in his thirties, he says. But he doesn’t play anymore. “I’ve promoted myself to refereeing,” the 56-year-old says, his accent a mixture of his native England and current home in B.C. Sipping on a pale ale at a quaint Victoria pub, Symington energetically shares his passion for the rules of the game. He has, what he calls, “the bugs”—an internal quest to referee.
Initially, Symington didn’t particularly enjoy refereeing. He took a local course to expand his knowledge of the game, and became fascinated with the rules of squash. When the World Junior Men’s Championships were held in Calgary in 1984, the organizers were short a referee, and Symington agreed to help out. “I first got the bugs from watching squash at a high level,” he says of these Championships, which included a Canadian team with then-juniors Jamie Crombie and Gary Waite. Symington began traveling to Canadian national tournaments and furthering his knowledge through refereeing matches whenever he could.
His big break was getting a call from Tom Jones, owner and tournament director of the U.S. Open, in 1988. “Tom asked me to be tournament referee at the U.S. Open, in Seattle, which I gladly accepted. I flew down there, and discovered I was the only referee,” Symington chuckles. He remembers the experience as “strenuous and stressful, but it gave me more of the bugs.” Traveling to North American and, eventually, world championships, Symington began to establish himself as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the rules of squash.
Symington’s name is among the 12 World Referees involved in the WSF. These men set the tone for referees everywhere. He’s proud of his knowledge of the game. He’s got ideas to change squash, to expand squash, and to market squash. “But all this starts with changing attitudes toward refereeing,” he says.
Symington’s key example of how refereeing attitudes can change the sport is Canadian squash. Canadian refereeing wasn’t very good back when Symington joined the World Junior Men’s Championships —as Symington says, it was “a bit of a joke. But it was the kick in the pants to get us going.” From here on, one of the goals of Canadian squash was to stand with the best referees in the world, which Symington claims they’ve achieved. He attributes the change in refereeing attitudes, along with the change to softball, as the main components of how Canada got to be a world power in squash. “The World Junior Men’s Championships at Princeton can do the same thing to U.S. squash,” he says.
To begin with, Symington thinks that the whole attitude that U.S. players have toward refereeing needs to change. “The thing holding back the game in the States is that nobody wants to ref matches,” he says. “The players who love the game need to understand that for the good of the game, they need to learn to referee. Then they need to behave on court, to encourage referees to do it. And the game will progress.” He sees the intercollegiate level as crucial to this, and thinks that each collegiate player should be a certified referee. He also recognizes the interest at the clinics he conducts across the U.S. “People love to ask questions, and love to learn,” he says. “They need to take this knowledge and translate it to their daily matches.”
Though he is considered a foremost expert on the rules, Symington is criticized as a referee wherever he goes. Some go as far as to say that he’s an awful referee despite the fact that he has a commanding knowledge of the rules. Both crowds and players can get fired up about calls, but he doesn’t let it get to him. “Most of the galleries are very knowledgeable,” he says of spectators, “and that’s fine. But you’ve got to shut it out. It’s easier to make a call as a spectator. And the galleries don’t know all the rules, they don’t have your level of training.” Symington feels the three rules of refereeing resemble those of real estate—Experience, Experience, Experience. And with players, a referee must demonstrate confidence. “If they believe you’re confident, they’re less likely to mess with your decisions.” So what if he gets it wrong? “At the top levels, it’s never ‘wrong.’ It’s marginal. And marginal calls can go either way,” he says. For example, at a recent clinic in Malaysia, during the World Open, Symington selected a tape of contentious calls to spark a debate among those who attended his clinic. Each of the 77 participants had a different opinion. Some of the players joined the clinic, and disagreed as well. “That’s the nature of squash,” he says. “There are always going to be gray areas.”
Symington feels that if players learn and apply the rules, they will clean up their acts on court, as well. He feels another thing holding the sport back is on-court behavior. “Imagine some sponsor sitting in the front row at a tournament, his company logo on the back wall, and two players cursing one another and the referee throughout the match. Not something he wants his company to be known for,” Symington says. He is passionate about implementing the card system—yellow card, yellow card, automatic default. “So many sports are doing that, and it controls behavior right away,” he says. No arguing, just cards. Symington feels this needs to start at the highest levels of the game, and will eventually filter downwards.
Symington is also a fan of the hardball system of refereeing, which involves three referees instead of one. “First of all, it eliminates the grievous errors, because the others can overrule. And it reduces arguments on court,” he says. A team of referees experimented with this at the Canadian Open one year, and kept statistics of overruled calls in each match. Five of the world’s best referees were there, and their initial calls were overruled an average of 3-5 times per match. “The fact is, you will be overruled,” he says of their experiment. “Not from error, just difference of opinion. I’m not wrong, not inferior, not inexperienced or bad. I just see it differently. And the final result is a fairer decision.”
If Symington had his way, everyone who played the game would be a certified referee. “It’s got to be an automatic obligation for every player.” He recognizes that much of refereeing is a judgment call. And, like the game, no one will ever perfect it. “Squash is the clash of bodies, either person making every effort to get out of the way, to the ball, to hit the winning shot,” he says. “There are so many variables, and there are always going to be debates about those 50/50 calls.” His favorite part of the challenge is these controversial calls, which will always be interpreted differently. “That’s why people talk about squash all the time,” he says. “There are people right now, in bars, talking about calls. That’s the beauty of it. And it will always be that way.”
Call him masochistic, a self-described maniac, or someone who’s got “the bugs.” However he’s viewed, Rod Symington has devoted much of his life to the thankless position of becoming one of the premiere rules mavens and squash referees in the world. He acknowledges and accepts the constant criticism thrown his way. Through all of it, Symington smiles, steps up to the microphone and continues to make calls around the world. “Stroke,” he says grandly. “What? How was that a stroke?” Here we go again.
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Feb 2008
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