Ref Gets Facialed

Guilty or Not? You be the judge.

Regardless if he purposely did it or not, this news still broke our heart. We could hardly imagine the pain she felt the moment the ball hit her face and the distress she’s going through. Hope this won’t happen again. Tears.

Last March 29th during a high school volleyball match in Florida,  a player from Westminster Christian School gave referee Olivia Harrington a huge facial. This VIDEO shows the player going up for the ball and smacking Olivia in the face.

The player posted this on his Facebook page: “The video is probably gonna look bad too, but I say it is an accident and stand by it. That’s that comrades.”

Ouch! We only saw the video since it’s painful to watch.

Due to the impact, her eye was bleeding inside with a busted blood vessels and suffered a broken nose.

“It busted blood vessels in my eye and caused my eye to bleed inside. I officiate volleyball games, I don’t look at stats, I don’t want to know who the better team is or anything because I want to call a good, clean game.” says Olivia. “He chose to take that ball and turned and hit me in my face as hard as he could. He has a vicious look on his face.” she adds.

She has urged police to arrest the high school athlete but could not make an arrest in the case. “There was no way for our detectives to be able to prove that this was done completely intentionally. In fact, that’s what the State Attorney’s Office agreed with us, as well.”  says Miami-Dade Schools Police Chief Charles Hurley.

Westminster Christian School officials have suspended the player and terminated the coach and his assistant. “It’s just unfortunate that the angle where he was and the direction the ball had to go was that particular type of swipe. I’d like to think that this whole thing was an accident and apologize and hope that it doesn’t escalate any further. There’s no ill will or anything like that.” says Coach Kevin Carr who was fired from his coaching job.

The student’s mother has released this statement to defend her son: “He did not see the ball make contact with the woman because he rarely has control of where he is hitting the ball. What a way of destroying a good young man’s life.”

We can’t really make a judgement out of this incident. We must admit that there are times refs make bad calls which get us so mad and frustrated that sometimes we end up cursing at the officials but a thought to smack, hit or facial any of the officials never occurred in our minds.

Joking aside, a good friend of ours was getting mad at the up ref after making bad calls. To show his frustrations, he politely passed a free ball to the official which surprised his teammates since it was game point for the other team. Toink! LOL!

Anyways, we hope this unfortunate incident won’t happen again. We’re crossing our fingers!

(Thank you Rudy for the story!)