Anytime. Anywhere. Any level. That’s the mentality NCAA lacrosse referees Bryan and Tim Luchsinger adopted from their father, Jim, and his longtime friend Tom Abbott, the current NCAA national coordinator of men’s lacrosse officiating.
On Memorial Day, that place happened to be on the biggest stage in the sport. The brothers officiated the NCAA Division I men’s lacrosse championship game for the first time in their over 20-year-long careers. The crowd of 31,524 raucous fans represented the biggest game they’ve officiated.
“No matter how big the situation is, when we’re together, we’re out there having fun, smiling and keeping each other loose,” Tim Luchsinger said. “I think outside of the two of us … it brings my dad back to the game that he got us into.”
They not only model how their dad treated them as a father, but how they watched him behave as an official. As teenagers, the brothers monitored how their father and Abbott operated together at the annual Lake Placid Summit Classic, which laid the groundwork for how they officiate now.
Because of their father, they met and learned from some of the best lacrosse referees from a young age — particularly Abbott, who the brothers said often officiated alongside Jim in the MLL and NCAA.
“The officiating world in lacrosse is just the third team on the field,” Bryan Luchsinger said. “It really is a tight-knit family.”
Jim Luchsinger suffered an injury that has since kept him out of officiating, but Tim Luchsinger said his father still calls them after games to offer constructive criticism or other pointers. He’s close friends with almost every lacrosse official he’s worked with, and that sentiment remains true with the brothers today — as most of their contacts are lacrosse officials.
“[With] moving up and all that, that’s how you learn to get better, to have those conversations,” Bryan Luchsinger said. “And that started with us seeing Dad have those people. We’ve kind of carried that, they’ve also carried it to us. Dad [has] shown us the way.”