MAKING THE CALL
Alumnus and NBA Referee Kevin Scott Fails Forward into an Exciting Career
In professional basketball, referees have a split second to make consequential decisions. With a whistle, they can alter the course of a game or the results of a world championship. They can incite the greatest joy or the fiercest anger in millions of fans. Making the right call means everything.
For Georgia Southern alumnus Kevin Scott (’00, ’02), the decision to become a professional referee didn’t come quickly. It came from disappointing necessity.
“My life’s dream was to play Division I baseball,” he said. “I put a lot of work into that, and I made it through the early stage of cuts [at Georgia Southern] and was asked to stay on and scrimmage with the team in fall tryouts. Ultimately, I got cut that week. I was devastated, and I remember sitting in my apartment there in Statesboro, wondering what I was going to do next.”
For two months, Scott attempted to pick up the pieces and move on. As a sport management major, he was surrounded by student-athletes, equipment managers, trainers, coaches — remnants and reminders of his former dream. When he was least expecting it, however, he was presented with an opportunity that changed everything.
Gene Sherry, executive director of Campus Recreation and Intramurals, and Nick Cochran, a Georgia Southern student and Scott’s high school classmate in Toccoa, Georgia, showed up at Scott’s apartment with a “sales pitch” to start refereeing intramural games.
Scott told them he’d come out, but he didn’t expect much from the experience. Needless to say, he was surprised by the result.
“I stepped on the floor for the first time and it’s just hard to describe,” he said. “A feeling came over me — still to this day it just felt right. I had no idea the first time I stepped on the floor that you could officiate for a living. But I just knew this feeling. I’ve never experienced that kind of passion before.”
Sherry, too, recognized Scott’s passion and aptitude for refereeing. “He had this innate ability to concentrate, a skill crucial in refereeing,” he said.
Drawing on years of refereeing experience at the high school and college levels, Sherry mentored Scott. He encouraged him to sign up for every camp, tournament and training event he could find. At one such camp, Scott caught the eye of a Southeastern Conference basketball referee, which opened the door to the next level.
Committing to refereeing was difficult at first. Scott balanced a fulltime job with the Department of Transportation in Georgia while hemade his way through the college officiating ranks. He spent almost 10 years as a college basketball referee before his persistence paid off. He was hired into the NBA Development League in the fall of 2007. After five years of hard work, Scott officiated his first full professional game on Feb. 1, 2012, in Minneapolis, where the Minnesota Timberwolves faced the Indiana Pacers.
“I remember calling my parents before I left the hotel,” he said. “I felt sort of a numb, tingling sensation or feeling when I took the floor for that first time — just the finality and gravity and the crowd and the environment. That’s the best way I can describe it. It’s just like a mainline IV of a dream.”
The average sports fan or even the most seasoned high school referee doesn’t always understand the intensity of officiating at the professional level. Scott says keeping up with the elite athletes in the NBA requires him to dedicate himself to year-round diet and fitness.
“Each season I get a year older… but then there’s a whole new wave of 18- and 19-year-olds coming into the league,” he said.
Scott says the biggest challenge of being a professional referee is being consistently right for an entire season. Every game now features 14 or 15 high-definition cameras catching each success and mistake. He says this takes a massive level of concentration and the ability to get past blowing a call.
“I feel like the best referees are the referees that can sustain their concentration for the longest periods of time,” he said. “You have to have the mental acumen and the mental toughness to get to that place in your mind where you can just get to work and everything slows down. Where everything’s quiet and you’re able to block out all distractions and be totally engaged, locked in and focused.
“When you make a mistake and you know you make a mistake. It can weigh on you,” he added. “It can allow for several minutes of mistakes and not being in a good place mentally. So how well do you recover from your mistakes? What mechanisms do you have in place to recover to where you’re right back operating at an extremely high, efficient level. That was a big challenge early on in my career — not allowing players and coaches to inflict self-doubt while I was refereeing a basketball game.”
At the time of this interview, Scott had officiated 653 regular season games and 35 playoff games. The NBA grades each of his games for accuracy. Due to his excellent performance last year, Scott reached the pinnacle of his career as a referee. On June 7, in Miami, he took the floor to officiate Game 3 of the 2023 NBA Finals. It’s a memory he says he’ll never forget.
“My first finals game. Wow. It was an emotional few days around that time, not only being able to cherish that with my family, but also just reflecting and thinking about all the people who went out of their way to help me,” he said.
In the stands were Scott’s mother and father, his wife, Sarah, and the friends who helped him discover his passion.
“You know, just having both my parents there, Gene and Nick, two individuals who got me started, and my wife…it’s just something I’ll never forget,” said Scott. “I’ll be able to cherish that.”
“I get emotional just thinking about it,” said Sherry. “It was real special for him to include Nick and I along with his family.”
Despite his busy NBA schedule, Scott regularly returns to Georgia Southern to give back to the place where his passion began. Sherry, who is also president of the Southern Eagle Officials Association, hosts training camps for referees for the Georgia High School Association each year. The camp is a requirement for referees wanting to work the postseason. Scott comes down each year to teach and spend time with the aspiring referees.
“Obviously, it’s a big deal for the students to meet an NBA referee,” said Sherry. “I don’t even know if they understand the value of what they’re getting. There are a lot of great referees, but they couldn’t teach refereeing. But Kevin has that skill as well.”
For Scott, giving back is part of his character. People invested in him, so he wants to invest in people…especially people at Georgia Southern. And every time he walks back into the RAC in Statesboro, it feels like home again.
“Influential, impactful individuals have helped me at some point over the last 24 years,” he said. “When you talk about giving back, especially to Georgia Southern University, to the intramural program, to the intramural officials and officials at every level — well, there’s no greater feeling.”
— Doy Cave