In the stands of a mid-November middle school basketball game, the praise is sparing and vitriol quick — at least for the two men in striped shirts.
“Good call, ref!” one fan shouts. “What are you doing?” yells another moments later. “Are you serious!” an incredulous parent roars, hands on head.
On the receiving end of the crowd’s musings is 23-year-old official Parker Deprey. He’s nine months removed from helping coach the Caribou High School boys to a state championship and five years removed from leading the Vikings to two gold basketballs as a player.
Now he’s officiating in the same gyms he grew up in. Deprey’s officiating partner? His father, Ryan.
“All I kept hearing was, ‘We need officials,’” Parker Deprey said. “I figured, ‘Why not?’ I got so much out of the sport and I wanted to do something to give back in a way.”
The Depreys are a welcome addition to the refereeing cohort in a state still facing an officiating shortage. Numbers remain at a status quo from post-pandemic figures, Maine Principal’s Association Commissioner of Officials Jeff Benson said, adding that the shortage exists in all of the sports the MPA offers, which includes high school basketball.
And in the face of the constant criticism often cited as the biggest difficulty in recruiting and retaining new officials, the father-son duo is laughing and smiling as they work.
“It’s with everyone I work with, I try to have a good time,” Ryan Deprey said. “If you’re not enjoying it, you’re in it for the wrong reasons. I’m having a blast so far. I haven’t had one game where I’ve been like, ‘Oh that was awful.’”
For Ryan, it’s a self-diagnosed dose of comeuppance.
“I’ve been a player, I’ve been the coach yelling at the refs, I’ve been the guy in the stands yelling at the refs,” Ryan said. “I know I’ve got it coming and I’ll deserve it.”
The itch to officiate began for Parker during the last basketball season, where he was an assistant coach running Caribou’s substitutions.
“I had said, ‘Whatever you decide to do, I’m 100% supportive,’” Vikings head coach Kyle Corrigan said.
Parker decided to referee. Then he roped in his father.
“I reached out to him and I was like, ‘You want to ref?’ and he didn’t deny it,” Parker said.
The pair officially joined the International Association of Approved Basketball Officials Board 150, which oversees officials in Aroostook County, this fall.
Monday night’s middle school doubleheader in Fort Fairfield between the Tigers and the Houlton Shires were the third and fourth games they have officiated together, with a few more on the schedule. It is, as Ryan put it, “a nice excuse to get to hang out again.”
“I think it’s way cooler for me,” Ryan said. “He’s stuck here with his father. As [your children] grow, you go from coming home at the end of the work day and there’s hugs and playing outside, and [now] it’s been a week since I’ve talked or heard from him.”
“He acts like I don’t live half a mile down the road,” Parker quipped.
Ryan previously learned to referee while working at the Caribou Parks and Recreation Department in the 1990s. Some mechanics have changed, but “a lot of that was just burned into my memory from when I was a kid,” he said.
The transition was a different beast for Parker, the former Maine Mr. Basketball semifinalist and Big East Player of the Year.
“Once you start officiating, you realize the calls you were arguing could have probably been 50-50 calls,” Parker said. “But you’re so focused on cheering for your own team that you don’t realize that a lot of things in basketball are 50-50.”
But Corrigan, who both coached and coached with Parker, sees a bright future as an official for his former star.
“He’s one that he’s not going to just halfway understand a rule,” Corrigan said. “He’s going to really put the time in, like he did as a player, like he did as a coach, to understand and to become one of the better officials, not just in Aroostook County, but in the state.”
Both Depreys encouraged more people to consider officiating as a way to get exercise, watch basketball and give back to the community.
“If you love the sport, it’s easy to like officiating, too,” Parker Deprey said.
