GETTING By Jason Franchuk
Yesterday’s approaches to recruiting, retention won’t get the results needed for the industry’s future.
J
ulian Tackett likes to say, “Don’t let process get in the way of progress.” In this day and age, when camp attendance and various other tedious rites of dues-paying passage are still the norm, the commissioner of the Kentucky High School Athletic Association has made it possible to stop worrying about outdated requirements and start focusing on genuine opportunities for advancement. “We’ve had second-year officials in some of our state events. Is our staff totally comfortable and sleeping well at night when you put them in there? No,” Tackett said. “Do they generally do as good or better than perhaps the people that were working before? Yes. So sometimes we’ve got to be willing to take a chance. The last thing, and this is really for my state association
brethren because we’ve all got different roles here, leadership is not simply repeating the status quo.” Tackett went way beyond the status quo last spring, when he introduced a female official to the largest-classification boys’ basketball championship game. Now, Hannah Reynolds did not come out of nowhere. She’s been an official for 10 years. The Kentucky native started primarily on the girls’ side and has done three state tournaments, including the 2021 title game. But she’s also heading into her eighth year of officiating collegiate women’s basketball, working in the Sun Belt, Missouri Valley and Horizon League among others, with her big goal being a crack at the SEC. (Full disclosure: The author has officiated a handful of games with Reynolds at the junior college level in Illinois.)
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