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Caulfield has 32 years’ experience as a basketball official at the provincial, national and international levels. Within the AUS alone he has officiated over 1,000 games and 24 championship tournaments. He also officiated at 22 CIS championships, including 18 final games. Internationally, he has represented Canada at 125 FIBA-sanctioned games and four World Championships. He established the Atlantic Basketball Officials Camp and coordinated over 60 clinics across Nova Scotia, while also founding Caulfield’s Camp of Excellence, which has run every summer since 2011, and is attended by young officials from all four Atlantic provinces.

 

Annual Program

“Every time I blew the whistle, I wanted it to be right,” says Roger Caulfield, one of Canada’s most respected basketball officials. With some of the game’s longest-serving coaches praising his control and integrity, Caulfield has got a lot right in his 32 years of making calls.

Caulfield was involved in all sports, including basketball, in high school, but his physical education teacher got him interested in officiating when he asked him to referee intramurals. Caulfield then took an officiating course in university and fell in love with being behind the whistle.

Caulfield fell into the AUS basketball officiating scene by accident, when four-time inductee and varsity basketball legend Brian Heaney picked him to fill in for another official who was called away to deliver a baby.

“I remember fouling Mickey Fox out in overtime in that first game,” says Caulfield. Fox is just one of the memorable players that Caulfield remembers fondly from his time on the courts. He also reminisces about the battles between Saint Mary’s University and Acadia, the sheer size of players like Ted Upshaw and Ross Quackenbush, and the talent of Fox, Steve Pound, Donnie Ehler and Alberta’s Karl Tilleman. “I was lucky enough to see four of the greatest shooters in university history,” says Roger as he lists those last four names. “I had to make good decisions when they were in the game and they were star players.”

Officiating in the AUS was an experience for which Caulfield was grateful because the league had some of the basketball in the country, and the high standards of play grew his love for the game. His AUS experience is extensive, with over 1,000 games and 24 championships refereed during his 32-year career as an official.

Caulfield was praised for his ability to manage a game, and to communicate with players and other officials. He always understood how important each game was to the players and the coaches.

“There are so many difficult decisions to make in a game,” says Caulfield, who admits that, part of the challenge of officiating is realizing there will be times when you’re going to miss calls due to your position on the court.

However, there were certain principles Caulfield followed to ensure he missed as few calls as possible. He always aimed to be consistent at both ends of the court, and he believed in being a good listener. His number one motto was to “be your best in the last five minutes of the game and work towards a happy ending.”

He believed it was important to be sharpest in the last five minutes of the game because those would be the calls that people remember.

Fellow official Dick Steeves of Moncton impressed the importance of those philosophies on Caulfield by telling him, “We’re front door guys,” meaning they should be good officials who can walk out the front doors with the players at the end of the game instead of having to sneak out the back.

While Caulfield suffered the disappointment of what he felt were the “politics of the game” when he was denied the opportunity to be an Olympic official in the 1990s, he did have the honour of refereeing games for the USA Dream Team at other tournaments. These teams included the “best players in the world,” such as Larry Bird, Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson.

Tournaments featuring the Dream Team wanted the best officials because coaches wanted the lowest possible chance of the players being injured. Caulfield made such a good impression as an official at these games that he was asked back to officiate games for the second and third Dream Teams as well.

He recounts some of the other highlights of his career as refereeing gold medal games for both the women and men in the same tournament, watching Canada defeat Argentina in Argentina in front of 24,000 fans, and watching Steve Nash come of age—”to see a Canadian grow to the level he grew to.”

Caulfield moved on to mentoring other officials because he wanted to stay in the game. “My life is basketball,” he says. Steve Konchalski, Hall of Famer and long-time coach of the St. FX men’s basketball team, always preferred Caulfield’s style of officiating, telling him, “Teach them the way you referee.” Caulfield has done just that, establishing a “Camp of Excellence” that, now in its twelfth year, welcomes over 40 aspiring officials from all over the country for a week each July. He has also offered camps specifically for female officials, ultimately producing a lot of elite officials who have found work in university basketball.

Caulfield says he passes on his advice to carefully consider “tempo-changing calls;” calls that could lose the players’ and coaches’ trust or even change the outcome of the game.

As school teacher by nature, Caulfield admits “It was more important to me than my own career to see these people move up the ranks.”

Still as sharp now as he was at the beginning, Caulfield has earned his happy ending in basketball—induction into the Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame.

Annual Program Courtesy of Katie Tanner