Photo by Jim Tate Marshall couple Kari and Kelly Loft are both officiating — Kari in softball and Kelly in hockey.

MARSHALL — Kelly and Kari Loft have been athletes and coaches. Why not come full circle and give officiating a shot?

Kelly Loft is the assistant athletic director for Communications at Southwest Minnesota State. His wife Kari is an ELL (English Language Learner) teacher at Marshall High School. They are SMSU alumni, Marshall fixtures and, most recently, rookie officials.

Kelly officiated his first varsity hockey game in Luverne recently and while he’s an older first-year official at the age of 49, he’s enjoying this new perspective of a sport he excelled at while at Mankato West High School, where he led the Big 9 Conference in scoring his senior year in 1993.

He’d played hockey “from the Mites level through high school” and has coached both Squirts and Pee Wees in Marshall for five years. He also was the public address announcer for Marshall High School girls games for four years.

A couple of years ago a friend, Jason Peterson, approached him about becoming an official. He decided it was time.

But why now? “(Kari and I) were empty nesters (son Dillon and daughter Regan had graduated from MHS) and it’s a way to stay in the game, get some exercise. I enjoy hockey, and though I work a lot of nights and weekends, there’s time during the week to do some officiating,” he said.

He got certified by two governing bodies, the Minnesota State High School League for high school games, and USA Hockey, for lower-level age-group games. There’s some rules differences between the two.

“They’re little things, but you have to be aware of them,” said Loft.

He’s a member of the Southern Minnesota Hockey Officials Association, and picks which games he wants to work through an online app called ArbiterSports, which shows available games, and how many officials are needed for each.

“You just pick the games you can officiate,” he said. “You may work with officials you’ve never met before. It’s not like football, where you usually work with the same guys every week.”

He is a linesman, which means he does not call penalties in the usual three-person varsity crew. In a two-man crew, he does call penalties.

As an official, what’s he learned wearing the stripes? “Good mentors are a key,” he said. “I’m been trying to (get better) at my mechanics and more confident with my calls — you want to ‘sell it.’ There’s also a lot more that goes on than people realize,” he said.

Kari Loft came to SMSU to play softball. She’s from South St. Paul and has quietly been a key contributor to the Marshall High School softball program’s rise to prominence in recent years. She’s been an assistant coach at Burnsville, was a 10-year assistant at SMSU, and was the C squad coach at Marshall High School for a couple of years before becoming the B squad coach for a dozen years. She got out of coaching her daughter Regan’s senior year.

“Most of her high school career I wasn’t able to watch her. She played for me on the B squad, but for varsity games I’d be on the other field coaching and wasn’t able to watch her play, so her senior year I gave up coaching to watch her play.”

Kari said she’s “been involved with softball ever since I was in third grade — I was a player and then a coach, so I figured the next thing I should do is umpire.”

She got a taste of umpiring two springs ago when she did some lower-level games. She was not certified, however. She became certified through the Minnesota State High School League last spring and does varsity games in the area. They are assigned through the Southern Prairie Umpires Association, which handles assigning both softball and baseball games in the region. She also does some summer age-level tournaments, and takes those games primarily through word-of-mouth.

“Towns will call up, see if I’m available. I don’t umpire that much in the summer months,” she said.

Her first foray into varsity umpiring at 50 has brought her full circle.

“I love umpiring, it enables me to stay in the sport and be a part of the action. You know you’re a part of the action when you take a foul ball off the mask,” she said.

Kari is the lone female umpire in the Southern Prairie Umpires Association, a fact she’d like to see changed.

“I feel you can always use more female umpires,” she said. “It would be nice to see more.”

Fan conduct is a concern for officials of all sports and a reason that fewer individuals get into officiating. Kari is thankful she hasn’t run across that type of conduct yet.

“Officials are always nervous about fan behavior but so far in all the games I’ve done the fans, players and coaches have shown great sportsmanship. That’s been a pleasant surprise and I’m appreciative of that,” she said.

One thing she’s had to realize as an umpire is that she’s no longer a coach.

“I’ll see something and want to say something, to point something out, to coach,” she said. “I may ask myself, ‘Gosh why did they do that?’ But then you remember you’re the umpire.”

Kari and Kelly met in college, and little did they know that first date consisting of pool in the SMSU game room followed by a Chocolate Clipper Dessert at Perkins would result in marriage, children, deep community involvement and, now, the latest chapter in their lives, officiating.