EXPOSED
The modal official works youth, high school, and rec leagues part-time — running the field, positioning for sightlines, enforcing rules in real time, and managing angry coaches and parents, none of which a camera rig does. But the single most visible task, judging ball position and boundary calls, is already automated where money exists: Hawk-Eye retired professional tennis line judges, and automated ball-strike systems are entering baseball. Sensors erode the calling function from the top of the sport downward; crowd control, safety decisions, foul intent, and game management stay human because someone physically present must own the call.
Nearly all of this fall was the 2020 shock. It has been climbing back since.
Median pay $28,550 → $40,710 +14.1% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+5.7%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 15,780 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +5.7% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 54/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~4,600 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
ScorerUmpireClockerMarshalRefereeStarterStewardessTimekeeperHandicapperPit StewardScorekeeperTest ScorerDance CriticDiving JudgePatrol JudgeRace StarterPaddock JudgePlacing JudgeState RefereeBaseball CoachDressage JudgeSoccer RefereeBaseball UmpireClerk of Scales
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Ball-tracking and boundary calls — the tasks sensors have already taken in ATP tennis and Triple-A baseball — are a real slice of the job, but the rest of a Friday night game is spotting a horse-collar tackle, deciding whether contact was incidental, restarting play, and ejecting a coach, which is why this lands at 11 rather than 5.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments You are on the field for the whole contest, in whatever weather the district scheduled, backpedaling to keep the play in front of you, taking foul balls off the mask, and physically separating players — that is uncontrolled-environment work, and 17 rather than 20 only because the venue is a marked, bounded playing surface with known dimensions.
No licence, no signature requirement State association registration and a rules-test certification get you assigned to games, but nothing about it is a practice licence: no statute makes you personally liable for a blown call, and a mis-called ejection ends in an association review or a non-renewal, not a suit against you.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls Intent on a flagrant foul, whether a pitcher's arm is a safety risk, whether to suspend play for lightning or a head injury, and whether a coach's conduct has crossed into ejection are calls made in seconds with no replay, no consultation, and consequences for a player's health and a team's season — the rulebook frames them but does not decide them.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (11/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (4/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (8/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (14/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 26 of this occupation's 54 points (48%).
Embodiment (17/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
No occupation passed every test: close enough to umpires, referees, and other sports officials on skills and subject matter, at least 10 points more resistant, no big jump in training, no new licence, no pay cut, and not shrinking on its own. That happens for 223 of the 654 occupations here that aren't SAFE, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving the section off.
The usual reason is that exposure travels with the skill profile. The jobs most similar to yours tend to be exposed for the same reasons yours is, so the near neighbours don't clear the gap — and the ones that do are a different kind of work, not a transfer of what you already know. Read that as a limit of this method, not a verdict that you're stuck: it only compares whole occupations, and it cannot see specialisation, industry, or anything you'd bring that isn't in a federal skill survey.
Here is that claim on your own job rather than in the abstract. These are the three occupations closest to this one by skill and subject matter — the places the work would most naturally transfer — with what the register scores them:
That is the whole problem in three lines. The nearest work is not meaningfully safer, so there is no move here that trades a similar skill set for a better verdict. This is not us running out of ideas — it is what the neighbourhood looks like.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 70/100 — SAFE.
Task-mix shift is genuinely two-tier: if ball/strike, line, and offside calls are fully sensor-handled (ABS in MLB, Hawk-Eye in tennis/soccer semi-automated offside), the residual job is foul intent, unsportsmanlike conduct, advantage rulings, and game management — none of which have a sensor analogue. Watch for high school associations adopting cheap phone-based line tech while retaining a human for everything else.
Formal assignment of ejection, forfeit, and suspend-the-contest authority to the on-site official under weather/lightning and crowd-violence protocols (NFHS lightning policy already does this in most states), with the association explicitly barring remote or automated override.
State youth-sports concussion statutes (all 50 states have Lystedt-style laws) being amended to name the game official — not just the coach or trainer — as the person who must remove a player from play and document it, with the official's certification revocable. Some state associations already require officials to stop play for suspected head injury; making it a statutory duty attached to a registered credential is the specific step.
State athletic association rules requiring a registered, background-checked official of record to sign the game report for any contest whose result affects postseason eligibility or state records — making the human signature the thing that validates the result, regardless of who made the calls.
Narrow route only: leagues marketing 'human-judged' divisions is not a real market. The plausible version is parent/athlete pressure after a high-profile automated-call failure leading a state association to keep human final say on subjective calls as a stated policy — a trust premium held by the institution, not paid by the buyer per game.
The limit. Pay and headcount are the binding constraint, not capability: this is a part-time, per-game market where the sensor cost curve determines adoption, and the modal official is already unreplaced at youth level for economic reasons. Liability and accountability gains would raise the score without raising the wage.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 860 | — |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 550 | $51,230 +26% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 540 | $51,600 +27% |
| St. Louis, MO-IL | 520 | $34,360 -16% |
| Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO | 490 | $42,350 +4% |
| Kansas City, MO-KS | 490 | $37,650 -8% |
| Salt Lake City-Murray, UT | 450 | $31,430 -23% |
| Provo-Orem-Lehi, UT | 420 | $29,790 -27% |
| Green Bay, WI | 40 | $77,670 +91% |
| Baton Rouge, LA | 120 | $65,230 +60% |
| Bismarck, ND | 70 | $63,920 +57% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 54. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.