EVERETT – Whatever intensity Steve Landro runs into as a West Coast Conference college basketball referee, he’ll have faced it before.
Take the first high school game he ever worked, for example.
It was a game in the early 1980s between Waitsburg and Ritzville, and it seemed half of each town was in the Ritzville gym that night. The two not only were basketball rivals in Eastern Washington, the game was a rematch of their state-tournament clash from the previous season.
“Remember my first game? I remember my first call,” said Landro, a Meadowdale High School graduate who was a student at Eastern Washington University at the time.
How could he forget? His first call was one of the tougher ones for a referee: charging. This one went against a Waitsburg player, and the crowd reacted with venom and vigor, Landro remembers.
“Half the crowd was booing me, the other half was going crazy,” he said.
Landro, who lives in the Silver Lake area of Everett, has been catching it from both sides ever since. And loving it.
“That’s what makes it fun,” he said. “You can’t be worried about what they say. It takes a thick skin because there are a lot of comments that come out of a crowd. At first, I would listen to it and sometimes it would bother me. But now I don’t notice it much. They don’t know me as a person, they just know me as a ref.”
Landro, 41, is beginning his third season as an NCAA Division I women’s referee in the West Coast Conference. He also works a considerable number of small college and high school games in Washington and Oregon, and altogether will call at least 50 games through March.
He aspires to referee in the women’s Final Four.
In the meantime, he’ll continue to pound the pavement during the early morning hours in his day job as a beer truck driver in Snohomish County, then the hardwood at night in gyms just about anywhere on the West Coast as a referee.
“I can be anywhere from Fairbanks to San Diego,” he said.
Or, on Sunday afternoons, at Qwest Field near the Seattle Seahawks’ bench, where he helps run photos of play formations to the coaching staff and warms up place-kickers and punters. He has worked home games since he was a kid, and at one time had the envious job of driving the golf cart/helmet that carted the Seagals around the field after a Seahawks touchdown.
The gig that gives Landro his biggest thrill is officiating a basketball game.
He learned to love it when he was 10 years old. After he had finished playing a youth league game in Lynnwood, league organizers put out the word that they needed a referee for the next game.
“I did it and I had fun,” he said. “They asked if I would want to do it more, and I said ‘Sure.’ That was the start.”
Landro has made a steady climb to the college ranks, although not without effort, expense and one frightening setback.
Not long after he graduated from Eastern Washington, Landro gradually lost the strength in his voice. Tests revealed polyps on his vocal cords, and he underwent a series of surgeries. He could barely speak above a whisper for four years, which derailed any hope of refereeing during that time.
His voice eventually came back strong, and so did his desire to become a college basketball referee.
“At that point, I loved to ref but I never realized how high I could go,” Landro said. “Once I got back into it, after a couple of years I realized, ‘Yeah, this could be a lot of fun.’ That’s when I started making some goals.”
Landro has called boys and girls high school games for several years, establishing himself as one of the more proficient referees in the area.
“Steve is one of those guys you like seeing come into the gym,” Marysville-Pilchuck boys coach Mike Lowery said. “When the ball goes up, he’s very conscientious and does a great job. He treats the kids right and he doesn’t try to be the show. He’s in control of the situation but he’s not trying to control the game.”
Besides the games he referees, the miles he travels and the hotels he visits for one night at a time, Landro devotes considerable time and expense in the offseason to improving himself. Last summer, he put himself through four camps, where he learned from some of the country’s top officials.
“If you want to get better as an official, you’ve got to do that,” he said.
That’s all in addition to his regular job driving a beer delivery truck for Alaska Distributors. He’s out of bed before 3 a.m. most mornings, which makes for little sleep if he has refereed a college game in Oregon and spent half the night driving back home.
“I’ve got some great bosses and they’re very flexible,” Landro said. “During the offseason I do as much as I can for them, work all the overtime they need. That way when I get into basketball season, they understand and they try to help me out.”
His time during the season also becomes more limited with his wife, Karen, and 16-year-old daughter Danielle. He’s a gym rat as a father, too, as coach of Danielle’s youth league team.
Landro also maintains a connection with football, working local high school games in the fall and, of course, the Seahawks’ home games. He has worked for the Hawks since the team began playing in 1976, arriving at the stadium around 8 a.m. to help set up equipment and staying until 6 or 7 p.m. after it’s all put away.
Wearing a striped shirt, though, has taken Landro where he truly wants to be, on the basketball court.
“I don’t know why anyone would want to officiate basketball, but you really appreciate a guy like Steve,” said Lowery, the Marysville-Pilchuck coach. “It is truly a profession to him, and he’s going to take off because of his dedication to it.”
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