Interview With Peter Tarnariss

For my One to One interview, I interviewed Peter Tarnaris. Peter is a currently 28 year old American Hockey League (professional) referee. Like myself, Peter is originally from just outside Chicago. While I still lived in Illinois, I would occasionally talk with him if we ran into each other; however, I never have talked to him or called outside of randomly seeing him. Because of this, we’ve never talked about his transition from junior hockey to professional hockey. As a young referee in junior hockey, I aspire to move up into pro hockey. Hopefully, I will be able to make that jump the same way we did. I decided to give him a call, after getting his number from a mutual friend. We spoke on Tuesday, when he was in his car, on his way to Des …show more content…
He said that he feels that, without bragging, that his biggest talent was his ability to defuse tense situations with a good combination of communicating seriously, as well as having strategic humor sprinkled in. He said that at the junior level, many coaches and players think that they’re always right; however, in pro hockey, based on the way you communicate, you can convince them to not care that you might have been wrong. This was something that really stood out to me. Another thing that stood out to me was the fact that he said he worked as hard as he could to not swear at people. He said, “It’s not fair that when players swear at us, we can give them penalties, but when we swear at them, they can’t do anything about it. It’s not (ethically) right, and it earns you no respect from anyone.” This resonated with me as well because, especially with junior hockey, the coaches take the stance that if their players can’t swear at us, we should especially not swear at them. One thing Peter and I differed on was when he said that sometimes, in pro hockey, the referee can do certain things (such as being enthusiastic against an away team penalty, or during a home team goal) to add excitement into the game. I’ve …show more content…
He said he’s also missed holidays with his family, as well as funerals of people in his family. Over the phone, he begins to sound somber. It changed the conversation to a more serious tone. He said, “You really have to be prepared to give up a lot from your life. It’s a grueling schedule, and it’s some of the best years of my life I’m using for this; and it’s not like I’m making much money.” For me, I feel the same way about my junior schedule, which made me questions whether or not I would like to take on a pro schedule. My initial assumptions going into the conversation were that pro hockey would be a lot more fun, and entertaining to work. However, I learned that it was a lot more work than juniors in terms of off-ice conditioning, travel time, and low flexibility time commitments. After this conversation, I’m questioning whether or not I want to go into pro hockey. Additionally, I will take away that as bad as I think my travel schedule is for juniors, there are others who have it tougher than I