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This is one of those hustles that if you do it right you can actually get into steady dough. I have a friend who has been doing this for years and when the NFL went on strike he was actually one of the replacement refs. Made more than a couple of G’s just by starting this angle when we were a lot younger. Since my patna A.B put me on to it on backchannels I’ll let him explain game.

“One of the kats at my gym put me on to ref’ing high school basketball games. From what he told me, he works 2 games a week at $50 a game and since he’s still training he only works middle school games. A middle school game isn’t going no longer than 2 hours if that, so you’re looking at $100 for about 4 hours of work.”

Setup:

Not sure how the process works in every state but from the info I got for Michigan (http://www.mhsaa.com/) its pretty simple. You register, pay a $30 fee for a background check etc, plus another $12 for every sport you want to ref, take an open book test online & score 70%, purchase your uniform, & get in touch with the local referee association to start getting assigned training contracts. Since its contract type work you basically work at will. If somebody is in a suburban area where the schools have lacrosse, volleyball, wrestling, etc then for a extra $12 per sport this hustle could last all school year.

Rather or not this hustle is worth it is really going to come down to location and the referee association your’e with since all of them pay differently, but it doesn’t hurt to look into it.

Parlay:  Like I said in the opening if you really pursue it you can get into being a referee on a college and then a pro level. That NFL strike was about chips as the average NFL ref makes between 25 to 75k and if you’re there for 10 years it’s 104k. Tha’s for part time work for 4 months.