Threatened with physical abuse on and off the field of play, accosted in the restroom or even at the gas pump. Those are a few of the incidents recited by local athletic officials as they seek the support of the law for protection in what is an increasingly volatile environment for those who legislate sporting events.

Matt Cabral, Scott Sunaz-Lodes and Rich Morrissette, each of whom lives or lived in the area, are firm supporters of bills being considered in both chambers of the Rhode Island General Assembly during the current 2026 session — House Bill No. H7549 and Senate Bill No. S2316 titled in each, "An Act Relating To Criminal Offenses-Assaults" — which would enshrine legal protections for referees.

All agree the time is now to act as the instances of misconduct on the part of patrons, but also from coaches, continue to increase in number.

Whether or not the bills pass remains to be determined. The lone East Bay legislator to sign on as a co-sponsor, State Representative Matthew Dawson (D-Dist. 65, East Providence) said he isn't sure there enough support to do so at the moment. He did acknowledge, however, the need for the law to be enacted and would be an "aye" vote if and when it gets to the floor.

Those officials who discussed the situation are of the belief the legislation needs to be passed sooner rather than later before something regrettable occurs.

"We live here"
Cabral, a native and resident of Bristol, said he's been on the receiving end of threats throughout his some 25 years as a football referee. And it's only getting worse.

The thing is, as he points out, those who often spew invectives don't realize they're doing it to people who reside in the same place.

"It kind of puts into perspective in the East Bay that we do have officials who live here and officiate here, as well as throughout the area," said Cabral, who consistently works on a six-person refereeing crew composed of mostly other local denizens: Ricky Sousa, of Bristol, who is also a softball umpire; Rich and Brian Morrissette, who grew up in Barrington; and Brian's wife, Paula, who operates the clock for games.

"We've been at Pop Warner games where we've had to be escorted out by the police because the parents were just threatening us in East Greenwich as far back as 20 years ago," Cabral said. "We were in Cranston in another Pop Warner game and the coach assaulted a player. We actually had to call the police and the coach got arrested about 10 years ago. It was from the Boston team vs. Cranston team. We actually looked at each other and said, 'Did that coach just punch that kid?'"

Cabral was the first to bring up the idea of how outside forces have influenced the declining decorum of parents, in particular, those who spend thousands, 10s of thousands of dollars on their children's sporting endeavors. He believes that monetary pressure has made its way into the discourse.

"Rich (Morrissette) was telling me there's actually a psychological component of this because basically the more money parents pay for their child to play, the more intense it's getting," said Cabral. "Because it becomes the financial component, where they look at it like, I'm paying all this money so my kids should be getting these officials that are top notch."

The effect of instant replay is gaining more and more traction at the youth levels as well. Cabral said how the National Football League is televised and examined has also affected how coaches treat officials.

"I will tell you, one of the hardest things for us as officials right now is the instant replay and all the camera angles in the NFL. Because we don't have that. I'm a linesman, so I'm on the sideline with the coaches. And I don't know many times where they'll say, 'Look, look, ref you made the wrong call.' They pull out their IPads, and they can't do that. It's against the rules. So, that is probably one of the biggest things that that has changed sports.

"Everyone watches professional sports and every professional sports has the replay now. That has already filtered down into the youth and high school levels where just about every game is filmed either professionally or by fans. The parents and coaches have taken the human element out of it. They don't realize, and I've said that many times, 'You realize we're human, right?' We're not computers. We're human."

Cabral said as every high school now records its game, the coaches and administrators have forgotten what it takes to be an official in real time, which has contributed to the discourse.

Cabral summed up the situation in this way, "“We referees need legal protection to have a deterrent for any potential assaults. Creating a law that makes a felony if you assault an official will not completely stop all in the future, but it may deter a parent or spectator from engaging with an official in a violent manner.”

Not a "gas"
For Sunaz-Lodes, who grew up in Smithtown, N.Y. and now lives in Warren, he's seen how the threats have affected not just him personally, but, as Cabral alluded, also on the ability to retain young officials.

Sunaz-Lodes predominantly referees girls' lacrosse and field hockey, of which he is the assigner of officials for the Rhode Island Interscholastic League. He has reduced his work in wrestling, the sport he competed in as a youth, in part because of the negativity from the stands and matside.

Sunaz-Lodes said he wouldn't say the need for the legislation is overdue, but it certainly is necessary.

"I kind of held out with COVID thinking when we lost all the sports I thought things were going to get better," Sunaz-Lodes said. "People were out in sports for a little bit. Maybe they figured, like, oh maybe they would self-evaluate. They'd just be happy that the kids are healthy, they're out there. But it was worse. 


"It was worse, and it was worse because people were losing things. So they were losing a lot with the masks and this and that. And so you have somebody up there that's a parent, and the most important thing in that parent's life right now might be his daughter winning that girls' lacrosse game. And it's sad to say that, but that's a reality."

Sunaz-Lodes works in education as a behavioral specialist at the elementary school level, giving him a different perspective on the situation. He feels he's better equipped than many of his colleagues in preventing and deescalating confrontational situations. Still, he's been involved in incidents both first hand or in close proximity.

"I had a playoff game in Massachusetts where the grandmother of a player was pretty hot. I got in the car, and next thing I see her go around, she's banging on my window," Sunaz-Lodes. "She had an issue. The kid was completely not playing within the rules. And it was it was playoffs, so everybody was heated. And I was like, 'This is wild.'"


He continued, "We've had an official that was approached while using the bathroom at halftime during a game girls' high school varsity. At halftime she went to go use the bathroom, and a parent was banging and berating her through the door while she was using the bathroom."

Sunaz-Lodes was also critical of coaches, who can often raise the temperature with their antics on the sideline.

"When they're calling us out, when it gets personal, they don't understand like they're inciting this mob," he continued. "And that's where it kind of falls off because if the coaches act like that you've got issues that usually stem when schools at times the coaches allow that behavior, or they allow fan behavior with berating the officials on the field. 
And that's when the (players) lose trust, and then the parents lose trust, and then it just devolves."

Sunaz-Lodes described one instance when the vitriol followed him all the way to a gas station near a field after a contest.

"So they lost the game, and I'm filling up my car with gas, and the parent drives by, comes off the highway to go at me, to yell and scream that I caused this kid's, his daughter's team to lose a game," Sunaz-Lodes said. "But what he didn't realize, what they don't understand is, I don't know if you got a gun, I don't know how if you're unstable or where you are. So that's the part where, I think, unfortunately, it's gone too far."

Though he calls himself a very positive person and holds out hope things could change for the better on their own, Sunaz-Lodes remains adamant a formal law is required to protect those are officiating now and into the future

"Let's say the silent majority has gotten better. So the majority of people are better, but they don't speak up because they're concerned because they don't want to get any altercations either. But the loud minority are getting more violent, more personal, more. They're getting more scary than it was when I first started. That's the best way I could put it," Sunaz-Lodes said.

He continued, "I would put it that, unfortunately, the direction that we're going in and just the atmosphere of, the climate of what's going on right now, it's unfortunate. But you need these kind of guardrails right now, you need something a little bit more because you're not going to get people wanting to do this. 


"I was with this young girl from she was doing a youth game in Massachusetts. She goes to one of these top private schools. She's exactly what lacrosse is looking for. She plays with one of the top private school teams. She's athletic. She wants to learn. She did the lower level, fifth and sixth grade, she thought it was great. The next one comes on, seventh and eighth. The male coach yells in her ear, I flip on that side, because we flip and I go to the coach, 'You're not gonna talk to this young kid again at all.'

"And he stopped, and I walked over to her and said, 'Don't worry about it. He's not gonna say anything else.' She goes, 'I'm done. I'm never doing this again.' And it's that quick. We lose more people in the first two weeks because of people are not allowing these officials, especially at the youth level, because the youth level is where they're supposed to be learning. And that goes back about saying is it long overdue, because people don't want to do this. They're not gonna get into it if they don't understand that there's some kind of something out there to protect them."

Retention at risk
Rich Morrissette is also quite familiar with how the rise in threatening behavior has made keeping officials involved has devolved. It's a much more difficult task then when he started refereeing over two decades ago.

"So I've been an official for 23 years now, a high school football official. I've done college, I've done semi pro, I've done I'm a football official, baseball official, softball official. I was the educator for Rhode Island football and baseball. Football I did for 15 years," Morrissette explained. "So I recruited all the students brought them through the classroom process, the education process, and then I've watched them drop off considerably due to heck being heckled, all kinds of different reasons that we lost. If I probably trained 100 officials, and if you went past five years, we probably retained 40 due to the atmosphere that they're being put in at this point."

Morrissette referred to the trade publication to which he subscribes, Referee Magazine, and a survey it conducted in 2025 where from a pool a prospective respondents, some 38,000 subscribers in all 50 states, 12 percent had been assaulted in the last year.

"So if you break that number down, that's about 4,400 officials that have been assaulted in this last year nationwide," Morrissette said. "And if we take that number, break it down, I' sure you can get an approximate percentage of how many were assaulted in our area or faced attempted assault."

Morrissette said he finds it unsettling to explain to a referee candidate they "have to a have a thicker skin" than most just a week or two into the introductory courses, but it's a subject that needs to be addressed immediately to given them an idea of what to expect once they actually begin to officiate.

"Looking back on what's happening, it's a really weird vocation. You gotta have a thicker than normal skin. Because if you don't, this game will eat you up and you will not want to come back week two," Morrissette added. "So a lot of the guys are really tough skinned. They're really good guys that are really forgiving."

Morrissette echoed the comments of Cabral on officials being from the very communities in which they referee, how the negativity takes a toll on them physically and emotionally.

"And one of the things is we're from your town. We're your brother, your sister, your father, and your mother, your best friend, your teacher," he continued. "We're part of your community. The people coming out to attack us have all the wrong idea. And the part is, we sit there and we take it because what we only really care about is the kids playing football.

"And you know we basically lose money. The money they pay us does not cover any of our expenses, our time. This is a vocation for guys that love sports more than anything. Every Friday night, you're gone, you don't see your family on Sundays, weekends. You don't see your family for 12 weeks. And then what happens is you go out to two or three games, you get challenged, you get torn up, you get maybe threatened, and then they're like, 'Okay, hey, we're gonna sign you up again for next year, okay?' And you say, 'Maybe I don't want to come back next year.'"

The fans and coaches, alike, have contributed to the decaying relationship with officials said Morrissette.

He explained, "Even the coaches have gone rogue on us. They don't want to accept that we're all on the same team. Being (referee association) president this year, one of my goals is to help the coaches understand that we can't play football without them, and they can't play football without us. And we're all out here on the same page. And I've got to be able to make this (officiating) something that makes people interested in coming and doing."

As for his personal experiences with the prospect of facing physical abuse, Morrissette said he only has to reflect on an incident just this past fall during a Junior Pee Wee level, 10-11-year-old Pop Warner game. After a lengthy engagement with one of the team's staff, he had to eject a coach for unsportsmanlike conduct and send them off the field as per the rules. However, the situation soon became confrontational.

"So these guys got to the point where at the end when after I told them to leave, they stood there in a (famed pro wrestler) 'Hulk Hogan' posture with the veins sticking out of their side of their neck, screaming at the top of their lungs at us, 'Good luck getting out of here today. We'll be waiting for you guys in the parking lot,'" Morrissette said.

He called law enforcement to report incident and to act as a deterrent, but the officers said there was little they could do legally.

"So, I called the police right then. The police came, I explained what happened to him and they said, 'Yeah, that was scary or something, right?' And I said, 'Yeah, I don't we don't know what these guys are gonna do if they're waiting in the parking lot or not when we leave.' When we leave, we're the last ones to go. I wanted to press charges. And the cop looks right at me, and he said, 'Sid he mention about punching you in the face or breaking your arm or hurting you in any way?' And I said, 'Well, no.' They said, 'Good luck getting out of here alive.' So I would take that as a threat. The cop goes, 'No, sir, that's not a threat. I can't do anything with that.'"

After that conflict, it became quite clear to Morrissette and his colleagues a law similar to the one being proposed in the General Assembly was not only needed, but necessary.

"If that was a protected act right then, that would have been written up as an incident and then anything to come out of it would have been protected," Morrissette said, adding. "This legislation is needed for the simple fact that circumstances in today's world are increasingly violent and leaving the opportunity open to cause violence to officials. It's just an open door."