Dee Kantner not close to calling it a game
Dee Kantner’s bucket list is blank.
Most people her age still have a long list of things they want to accomplish or experience, but not the 1978 Exeter grad. She’s done it all when it comes to officiating basketball.
She has worked 25 women’s Final Fours and more than a dozen national championship games.
She worked the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney and the FIBA Word Championship a few years before that.
She spent more than a decade working for the WNBA as Director of Referee Development and Supervisor of Officials.
And, most notably, she was the first woman (along with Violet Palmer) to officiate an NBA game. She made history in 1997 when she officiated a game between the Philadelphia 76ers and Atlanta Hawks. It was the first time in a major U.S. sport that a woman worked a game in an all-male league.
Kantner has been there, done that. Yet at 62 she’s still finds herself hopping planes and sleep-deprived from October to April as she works her way around the Atlantic Coast Conference, Southeastern Conference and Big Ten calling games.
“The good thing is I don’t have to (work),” Kantner said Wednesday evening before speaking at the Berks County Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame awards banquet, “but I love it. I’m still having fun. Everything still works.”
She’s fit and trim and on top of her game; she still loves a lifestyle she has known for 40 years. Why stop now?
“I’ve had some really great moments, but I don’t look backwards,” Kantner said. “(My mindset is) What’s next?”
Come October she’ll return to Reading to be inducted into the state chapter of the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame. It’ll be her fourth Hall induction. She’s a member of the Exeter Hall of Fame, the Berks County chapter of the PA Hall of Fame and the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame (her home for the last 30-plus years).
She also received the Naismith Award in 1997 as the Women’s Official of the Year.
After she picks up her next Hall of Fame honor it’ll be back on the road again for another season of calling fouls and buzzer-beaters.
“Someone asked me: ‘Why do you want to keep going back to the Final Four? You’ve done 25 of them?” Kantner said. “To me, it’s not the number. I just want to be the best I can, to service the game as well as I can.”
It’s a lot more fun than being a pipe stress analysis consultant. That was her first job after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh, where she played field hockey and earned an engineering degree. Later she moved to Asheville, N.C., and worked in sales for Westinghouse.
She started reffing in college so she’d have money for “beer and shoes.”
She’s well-compensated now, having worked at the top levels of the game for decades. But she hasn’t strayed far from her roots. She still calls Reading and Berks County home and readily returns when asked.
“I just have better beer and better shoes now,” she joked Wednesday, speaking at the Green Valley Chateau & Tent, where 36 student-athletes from 18 Berks schools received $500 scholarships, as well as an award from state senator Judy Schwank.
Kantner made a point to honor Berks coaching legend Jean Frey, crediting the former Eagles coach with laying the baseline for a life that’s been highly successful in the classroom and the business world.
Kantner played field hockey and basketball and ran track and cross country at Exeter; she was All-Berks in three sports. She helped lead the Eagles to a pair of county basketball championships in 1976 and 1977; her senior team finished 29-3 and reached the state quarterfinals.
She said “passion and perseverance” have been instrumental in her success and advised the student-athletes to “find what you love to do and make it work.”
She urged them, as she does any young athletes she meets, to consider becoming officials. She’s always trying to recruit people to that avocation. She is concerned about the shortage of good refs at all levels and is particularly concerned there aren’t enough women reffing girls’ and women’s sports.
“We need them at all levels,” Kantner said. “There are more women (working now) in the (NBA’s) G League, and there’s pressure on officials in the top (men’s college) leagues to hire more women. Now I’m afraid we’re going to be pulling our best (female) officials into the men’s game.
“There’s nothing wrong with that; I’ve refereed the men’s game, too. But we still need more women; I want representation so that young girls and women can see that. We still need that representation, and hopefully will have that.”
Kantner says many young people don’t want to become officials because they don’t want to take the abuse from fans, or at the lowest levels from parents. She’s taken more than her share — she was under tremendous scrutiny breaking the gender line in professional basketball.
Difficult as it has been to hear people screaming at her she learned years ago not to measure her self worth from how fan’s judge her peformance.
“The positives far outweigh anything else,” Kantner says of her officiating career. “I’ve gone places in this world I would have never gone without this whistle. I’ve had experiences that can’t be replaced.”