The history of the referee shirt
Imagine how embarrassing it would be if you were a quarterback playing a game of football, and you screw up by accidentally throwing the ball to the referee that you thought was one of your teammates, because he was wearing a white shirt just like your uniform. That is what happened to an Arizonan college athlete when he was playing against Eastern Michigan University in 1920 according to the New York Times. The referee was named Lloyd Olds.
“He was the guy who came up with the referee shirt,” Greg Steiner, EMU’s senior associate athletics director for external affairs, explained.
The Olds Rec/IM is a wonderfully rambling collection of buildings yoked together near the middle of campus named after him. The incident obviously corrupted the result of the game, which bothered the professor so much that he asked a friend of his to help design him something so unique that nobody could possibly mistake him for a player again. The ditching of the formal wear typical of referees at the time was not well received by everyone according to the Times, but it has now been standard practice for so long that it is surprising that it needed to be invented – but it was invented at EMU.
Michigan State Normal School
This funny little story is just one of the surprising ones that you can delve into at Eastern Michigan University, which turned 175 in 2024. EMU started out as a Michigan State Normal School, an institution dedicated to providing schoolteachers across the rapidly expanding United States…