JUST PREPS : Whistle While They Work : The Gender Gap Has Been Breached in Football, Where Women Are Starting to Call Penalties and Signal Touchdowns

When Maggie Belker walked into a preseason meeting in 1991, before her second year as a high school football official in the San Gabriel Valley, she made the 50-plus men in the room alter their traditional thinking.

No one had expected her back, and perhaps the men chuckled a little at “that woman” who had tried to join them the year before.

“I walked in that room and I think a lot of jaws dropped,” Belker said.

The season before had been fraught with degrading remarks from players, coaches and fans who believed a woman had no business in football.

There were injuries--bumps, bruises and the occasional sprained ankle.

Also, history said she wouldn’t be back. Other women had tried officiating in the San Gabriel Valley but had quickly quit.

“I think they all thought, ‘Well she gave it a try, but she won’t be back for more,’ ” Belker, 38, said.

Five years later, Belker has become a fixture at high school football games in the San Gabriel Valley and firmly entrenched as one of the few female officials in the Southland.

But as significant as it might seem, she doesn’t see crashing the officiating fraternity as anything monumental.

She has never considered herself a modern-day Joan of Ark or figured she was starting a revolution.

“I never looked at it as anything more than finally getting to be involved in a sport that I have always watched and always loved,” Belker said. “My high school never had girls’ teams, and they laughed at the idea of me trying out for the football team.”

She was raised a Green Bay Packer fan in Centralia, Ill., and when she moved to California in 1982, she became a USC fan. But it was not until a friend persuaded her to try officiating in 1990 that she was finally able to involve herself on the field.

“There was never any moment where I made a pact to go through with it, and I never really discussed it with my husband,” said Belker, who also works for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “I just started taking the classes and training.”

And then she was on the field at St. Francis High--line judge on her first officiating crew.

“I remember things were going pretty smoothly, but then I signaled for a touchdown and this man sprinted off of the sidelines and started yelling at me,” she said. “He was someone who was known among the officials and said everything insulting you could imagine.”

That others had also signaled “touchdown” didn’t seem to matter to him.

In that first season there was more bad than good.

There were comments:

--”Get back in the kitchen.”

--”Who’s the broad?”

And the pressure.

“I think every official has to prove him or herself in that first year,” Belker said. “I wanted to get every call perfect so no one could say I missed it because I was a woman.

“I think in a way there were people looking for me to fail that first season.”

But there were also positives, such as a high school coach congratulating her after a good game, or the coin flip at a Junior All-American game when an 8-year-old innocently asked, “Do you like my coach? Would you go out with him?”

And those positives and the pleasure of finally feeling neck deep in football were enough to bring Belker back for that second season. She walked into that meeting and made her fellow officials view her, not as someone who was looking for a quick snack, but someone who was going to pull up a chair at their table and be there when dessert comes.

“It’s like second nature now,” Belker said. “I’m just one of the guys.”

*

In a way, Denise Forlizzi has always been one of the guys.

In a sport of coaches’ sons, she is an official’s daughter, one of two female officials in the San Fernando Valley. The other, Linda Wilcox, has also worked high school basketball and baseball.

Unlike Wilcox and Belker, Forlizzi has been surrounded by officials most of her life. Her father, Joe, worked high school football games for 27 years, and her brother, Joe Jr., has been an official for 16 seasons.

In 1982, she picked up a whistle.

“They finally convinced me,” Forlizzi, 37, said.

In her first season she worked mostly on her father’s crew, which paved her way both on the field and with the other officials.

“Because I had grown up with most of them, the older officials treated me like a daughter and the younger ones like their sister,” said Forlizzi, who works as a regional sales manager for Alta-Dena Dairy.

But it wasn’t a completely smooth start.

In her first game, Forlizzi was blind-sided by a player well after the whistle. It was questionable whether the player was even involved in the play.

“I kept thinking it was done deliberately,” she said.

The hit left her with a broken hand, which she learned about only after finishing the game. It also left doubts about her choice of hobbies, but that is skepticism 13 years in the past.

Since that first hit, she has made history twice: once by officiating a season with her brother and father and again by working with Wilcox.

“She is a good official,” said Tony Cuppari, who gives Forlizzi her assignments. “She is well respected among the coaches and officials because she has proved that she does the job well.”

But the stereotypes, although not as pronounced, remain.

“I put up with a lot my first two years, and there are still times when fans or players say something,” she said. “I imagine there will always be a few people who will have something negative to say.”

And some positive things are said, particularly by other women.

“Sometimes the mother of a player will come up to me smiling and say, ‘It’s about time,’ ” Forlizzi said. “It makes you feel pretty good, as if you were the one who scored a touchdown.”