Shakeia Taylor

speaker

199 appearances 5 recordings 2 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 8 Apr

Shakeia Taylor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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The Athletic NBA Daily · Warriors win without Curry + Can NBA referees improve? · 19 Mar 2025 podcast

And there's always a complaint about officiating, no matter the level, no matter the league. And so the fact that these people saw a need and said, OK, how can we impact this? And some of the big parts of officiating is data. I don't think the average fan considers that it's data. How much is this happening? How often are we making this call? Where are we standing when we're making this call?

What exactly should I be looking at? for this to be correct or accurate. And then you officiate the offense differently than the defense. So you have to know the flow of the game. You have to kind of know a player's tendencies. You have to know the rule book. There's just all this stuff on top of that. And as she and I got to talking, I was like, okay, this is amazing.

This is sort of a pulling back of the curtain that the average person doesn't get. Instead, we get the mistakes or we get the good calls or we get the game impacting things or we get the players flipping out. We get the technicals. We don't know what goes into it.

And something that I thought was interesting that I'm sure you all will too, is most officials are former athletes and they're getting in five miles per game, running up and down the court with elite athletes, five miles per game.

Absolutely. It's even in my lead. I mentioned that like with the proliferation of gambling, referees are, they're under threat. Something that James Williams said in our conversation was social media is not a safe place for an official. In fact,

early in his career, which obviously was in the pre, you know, boom of social media, but he remembers just feeling so horrible about a call in a game and the things that were said to him that he started wanting to work harder and wanting to be better and wanting to make fewer mistakes. Unfortunately, that's not how it goes for a lot of people. You get berated and

one time too many you get cursed out you get your life threatened one time too many and you're like i'm out of here i'm not doing this and on the lower levels they're getting it from parents right like parents think they know the game parents and i'm not saying parents don't know the game but you you all know what i'm getting they don't no they don't no i'll say it they don't yeah i used to tell them that uh when i coached high school i used to tell them that at the beginning of the year

So go ahead. But that's what they experience, right? They experience exactly what you and other coaches experience is parents telling them how to do their jobs. So imagine it when you're at the NBA level, you got thousands of people watching on TV, live streams. on social media, in the arena. And one mistake, you already have the weight of this could impact the game.

This could impact the outcome of the game. You know, this could impact player relationships. But then you have this idea that I could be threatened and harmed, you know, after this. And so James talked about like wanting to not only teach the basics of how to do this job, but how to steel yourself out

to be able to sort of handle all of the outside noise and getting access to him to go back to your earlier questions, you know, was I really had to ask the MBA, uh, for permission to speak to him. Um, And I explained what the story was about. And, you know, he had to get clearance as well. It was a it was a process.

It wasn't something that I was able to just sort of call him up and say, hey, can we talk about this? It was a it was a process. And in that process, I learned so much. I actually have a greater respect for people who opt into being an official because it is a service job and people in service jobs do not get thanked.

So the rule book, the NBA rule book is 75 pages, right? So this is 75 pages of rules that all of these referees have to know. So you have to learn this, but they have no participation in the making of the rules. The way James explained it is the rules are made by lawyers, right? So it is not someone who is on the court looking at a game in flow.

It is made by someone who is just saying this is what we don't want in the game. Right. These are the things that we don't want to happen. So not only do you not help create the rules, but you have to have the mind to store that. how many rules are on 75 pages y'all? Like they've gotta be, it's gotta be a ton.

There's gotta be a ton of them. So your, so your, your body has to be able to run five miles a game. You gotta be able to keep your feet in position. You gotta sequence your eyes. You gotta follow the play and you gotta run through a 75 page rule book as this is happening, right?

This is a mentally and physically taxing role on the court that we mostly don't pay attention to until something happens. Right. I just thought that was really fascinating that there is no participation from officials in court. What is, you know, the part of officiating that matters? The rules.

Absolutely. Something that came up a lot in my conversations because I didn't just talk to James. Right. I talked to Monty McCutcheon of the NBA. I talked to other people at Refmasters and I talked to someone who is using Refmasters to sort of help improve herself as a referee. And what I thought was interesting was everyone mentioned up, down, rebound.

So now whenever I'm watching a game, I'm looking at up, down, rebound. Right. Because I want to see what they're seeing. That's not something that I really as a normal watcher, you know, I'm like paying super close attention to. But they talk about how like what they're watching, where they have to be standing, the way their bodies have to be positioned. for that one thing.

That's not including everything else.

I feel like I would not give a good explanation for that.

So as it was explained to me, when a player goes up, right, for the rebound, you're watching not only their hands, but you're watching their feet and you have to watch everyone around them. Right. So you can't just watch the ball. So your eyes have to go. I'm sorry. I'm using my hands as if people can see me on YouTube.

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