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Y O U R O T H E R L I F E Whistle Blower |
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Photo by John Davis |
Adrian Hill, in his first game as a high school varsity
football ref, blew a call. In a contest at Fairmount
Heights in Prince George's County, the quarterback for
rival Central High faked a handoff to his running back and
ran for a game-winning touchdown. But Hill was watching the
empty-handed running back, not the ball, and when he saw
the running back tackled by an equally fooled defender, he
blew the play dead, negating the touchdown. Central went on
to lose the game."I learned an important lesson that day," says Hill, a flight software engineer in the Space Department of the Applied Physics Laboratory. "Just because you see a runner get tackled doesn't mean he has the ball." Hill has overcome that 1991 gaffe. He kept working high school games and did his first state high school title game at the University of Maryland in 1997. Hill refereed another Maryland prep championship game at Ravens Stadium in 2003, then moved up to the college level in 2004. He is now in his second season as a ref for Conference USA, a major-school conference that reaches from West Virginia to Florida and west to Texas. He also worked four NFL Europe games in 2007. "Like a lot of people I have been a football fan as long as I can remember," he says. "Even when I was young, I thought it would be fun to put on the stripes."
Would he like to work in the NFL? "That would be the
ultimate goal." |
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The Johns Hopkins Magazine |
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