Husband-Wife Team May Officiate Games in the Big Eight Together

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — The dual relationship between Rhonda and Bill Summers started three years ago with a chance encounter on a basketball court.

It blossomed into marriage--and now could bring them together in a full-court partnership as referees for Big Eight Conference women’s basketball games.

On June 3 Rhonda Summers was notified that she had been accepted by the conference to serve as a referee for women’s games this winter, joining her husband who began working men’s and women’s conference games last year. The Summerses are the only married officials in NCAA Division I athletics.

It took nearly a year of encouragement from Summers, a referee for 19 years who is known as “Pee Wee,” before she applied to the Big Eight.

“Pee Wee really encouraged me to apply,” she said. “I applied for the application but didn’t put in the application with the letter of recommendation and my resume until a year later.”

The Big Eight plans no special provisions for the Summerses, who are as likely to work together as any two referees in the conference.

Rhonda Summers remembers the first time she officiated a basketball game with the man who would later become her husband.

“It was on a raised gym floor, and I had never worked on one before,” she said. “The whistle blew and I fell off the edge of the floor. I know Bill was thinking to himself, ‘Oh no, is this what the rest of the game is going to be like?’ And he had never worked with a woman before.”’

For Pee Wee Summers “it was love at first sight. And we started dating right after that.”

A year later they were married. They continued to work as basketball referees but not on the same level.

The Summerses, who live in Kansas City, Kan., have worked together just once on the college level--at an exhibition game last year between the University of Kansas and the Yugoslavian national team.

“We’d argue all the time about how to do things,” Summers said. “It was tough working our way through who’s right and who’s wrong, but then we just decided that everyone has their own way of doing things.”