Pro Lacrosse’s Top Ref Is As Famous As the Players

The Premier Lacrosse League launches its eighth season May 8, courting its biggest campaign yet. Since its 2019 inception, the professional men’s league has been in a state of constant change—a full sprint to grow its viewership, crowds, venues, media deals, and investors. 

One thing that has remained is Matty Palumb.

The PLL’s head referee, who leads the officiating crew for nearly every men’s game as the league tours the country, is a star in his own right. His banter with players and coaches is woven into the PLL’s slate of increasingly national broadcasts. Many of Palumb’s interactions have gone viral, spreading outside the growing—but still realistically tight—lacrosse circle. 

Across more than 30 years, Palumb has seen the game in many forms: as a three-time NCAA championship-winning goalie at Syracuse, where he played for one of the most widely regarded teams of all time; as a men’s college referee, where he’s officiated multiple Division I national championships; and in the pro game, where he reffed in both Major League Lacrosse and now the PLL.  

He knows his main-character energy is not for everyone. But he tells Front Office Sports that the noise simply doesn’t bother him, especially if it helps grow the game. As lacrosse continues to push its perceived limits, Palumb just wants the sport in front of as many people as possible—as fast as possible. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Front Office Sports: Even though refs are supposed to be largely invisible, you’ve become an essential part of the PLL. How did that happen? 

Matty Palumb: The college game is a little more conservative—it’s academic institutions and a lot of administrative types. The college atmosphere is a little more buttoned up compared to the PLL. Part of pro sports, obviously, is entertainment. I’ve never set out to entertain—I’ve just kind of always been me and had fun with it. At the pro level, there are just more personalities and, administratively, people are more accepting of it.

FOS: What do you think it says about the state of the sport on the professional level that you have enough of an audience to go viral with your clips?

MP: It’s the natural relationship between refs and players and refs and coaches. There’s always some type of antagonistic element to it. They’re not going to like everything you call—there’s never been a game where everything goes one team’s way, and there’s always something that goes against everybody at some point.

I think this thing was really born when we went to the bubble in 2020, and we were locked up for 20 days and doing two, three games a day. And they kind of had everybody captivated at home watching TV. I was a good element for people locked in their houses, looking to have some fun.

But listen, I’m going to miss a call in every game. Tough shit—just like you drop passes in every game, and just like [coaches] make decisions that you don’t like in every game. Games are imperfect, which is just fine. These are lacrosse games, not life or death. Sometimes we lose track of that, and I try to make sure there’s always time to have a laugh and have some fun. I’ll believe that until I’m dead.  

FOS: Lacrosse is at a place where it’s really still minting stars and, in some cases, you’re more recognizable than some of the players. Is that a problem?

MP: I’m not sure that’s the case through everyone’s eyes. I think some people get more of a kick out of me than others—trust me, I’m fully aware not everybody thinks Matty P is the bomb, and there are plenty of people like, “Why doesn’t he shut up and ref?” But this doesn’t come from ego at all. This is how I’ve always lived. 

My core [belief] of officiating is if you watch me ref, there’s no denying that I love being out there, and I cherish it, and I don’t take it for granted. And I think when you attack things with good intentions, which is exactly how I attack the PLL stuff, I think most reasonable people say, “Matt, he loves to be out there.”

FOS: How does transparency in officiating play into growing the sport?

MP: Women’s lacrosse [is particularly challenging]. If you made me go referee a women’s game, it’d be a disaster. I don’t understand it. So, if I don’t understand it, I can guarantee you that any non-women’s-lacrosse-community person, a regular sports person, is going to absolutely have trouble understanding it. I think men’s lacrosse is a little easier to digest for people rule-wise, because there are no stoppages that are very nuanced. Usually, in a men’s game, if we stop, it’s fairly obvious.

If we want to be mainstream, we’ve got to be able to be understood by mainstream people. You watch a basketball game, you understand basketball, but that doesn’t mean you know every little rule—but the general gist of the flow of the game. You have to make it so people get it, so the casual person can enjoy a game without asking 92,000 questions.

FOS: When you think about that “mainstream,” what would that look like for lacrosse? How can the sport reach fever pitch?

MP: Continue to leak geographically. When I was a player, basically 99% of the good players were located between Boston and Washington, D.C., on the Eastern Seaboard—and refs and coaches. If you think about it, there’s no other game in the world that is like that—like, there’s great soccer played in Oregon and Florida and the Carolinas and Texas and New York and New Hampshire. There’s great football all over the country. You can’t say the same thing about lacrosse.

A kid in California or Washington or Texas—the youth is starting to play in those areas, but they can’t go to a Division I lacrosse game. I don’t think there’s any doubt that the PLL is closing the gap, but still, the mecca of college lacrosse is Division I. College lacrosse is [expanding], but is still not there west of the Mississippi River. You can count [the programs] on one set of fingers, and it’s the only sport in the world that you can do that with.

FOS: Lacrosse has always had a conversation about its limits—prep school sport, East Coast sport, niche sport. Is that ceiling real, or have we already broken it?

MP: I think we continue to kind of poke holes in our ceiling. We bust through with the PLL. I’m a guy that was on the ground floor of [Major League Lacrosse]. Now, we’ve got more people working in the substitution area in the PLL than the MLL had working total. 

I don’t think the ceiling is done being lifted. It’s just that lacrosse is our little thing, and that’s kind of what we love about it. Of course, the danger of it being “our little thing” is all nobody else gives a shit about it. Now, it’s our little thing that’s growing up to be a big thing with caretakers of the game—guys like [PLL cofounders] Paul and Mike [Rabil]. I consider myself one of those on the officiating end.

It’s important to realize there’s more to it than just our guys, our buddies that play. It is more global, right? When the PLL goes to Japan, and you see those highlights in the clips of how nutty those people get about PLL lacrosse—it’s really cool to see. It reminds you that it’s not just your neighborhood game on Long Island or upstate or in Baltimore.

We’ve made really good progress—the college part of it, the pro part of it, the indoor part of it, the women’s game. There’s a lot of different flavors of lacrosse to sink your teeth into nowadays, and I think that’s cool.