Holding Court

For Cruse, one of the highlights of this year’s NCAA tournament was the Ohio State-University vs. University of Connecticut game in Seattle on March 25 that aired on ABC and broke a Sweet 16 record with 2.4 million television viewers. The matchup was also notable because Ohio State’s Buckeyes ended the UConn Huskies’ streak of reaching the Final Four 14 consecutive times. Overall viewership for the Sweet 16 was up 73% over last year, according to ESPN.

“It was exciting to know that I was officiating a game that’s part of this record-breaking historical growth,” Cruse says.

Looking ahead to the WNBA season beginning May 19, she says, “I hope the synergy of the women’s college game can connect to the energy the WNBA has already captured the past few seasons and show that women can not only compete but excel as part of a global product, and advertisers and sponsors and TV networks can truly buy into it.”

‘The Perfect Fit’

Cruse’s passion for basketball developed long before she became a referee.

“As a younger kid, I wanted to do everything my older brother did,” she says. “He played football, so I played flag football. When he started to play basketball, I wanted to play basketball. I also played soccer — all the sports young kids do.”

The daughter of Navy veterans who both worked in health care, Cruse first visited William & Mary when her family was living in Virginia Beach in the early 1990s.

“I remember quite vividly being a little kid, maybe 8 or 9 years old, and driving by the campus and looking out the window and thinking, ‘I’m going to go there someday,’” she says. “I always excelled athletically and academically, so it was the perfect fit that I ended up at William & Mary playing sports.”

Basketball took her in a different direction at first, however. While attending James Madison High School in Vienna, Virginia, she was recruited by both William & Mary and Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas. She spent her freshman and sophomore years at SMU, but when she learned there was an opening on the W&M team, she took the opportunity to move closer to home.

Thinking she might follow her parents’ career path, Cruse majored in kinesiology.

“At the time, William & Mary had one of the very few undergraduate programs that involved working on an actual cadaver as part of an anatomy course, and I spent one of my summers at William & Mary taking that class,” she says. “It was very hard. I’m proud to say I passed with an A-minus.”

Although she ultimately didn’t pursue health care as a profession, Cruse says her studies at William & Mary have helped her as a basketball player and as a referee.

“Officiating is not an easy business for someone to rise to the top,” Taylor says. “It’s a tremendous amount of travel. It’s a lot of pressure, especially being on the court in those big-time games when they’re close. But she does it incredibly well. She quickly rose through the ranks, and as one of the higher-level officials, she’s always in demand.”

As a referee, Cruse projects confidence, Taylor says. “She’s really stoic and I think you have to be that way to be a good official. You have to have tough skin. You can’t be reactionary.”

‘The Wind Caught Me’

At first, officiating basketball games was an easy way for Cruse to earn money during breaks while she was attending William & Mary. Her father, Todd Cruse P ’06, assigned football and basketball referees for Vienna Youth Inc., and he recruited Tiara and her brother, Ty Cruse. In the summers, she would officiate Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) basketball games.

“It was exciting and engaging, and it connected me to the sport in a way that I’m not sure being a fan or even coaching could, because you're literally on the court and your officiating community becomes your team,” she says. “It was a very similar experience as being a player.”

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology, Cruse started working as a market analyst at commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield in Washington, D.C., and considered applying to law school or medical school. She continued officiating on the side at high school and then college basketball games, moving up from Division III to Division I, and later the NBA G League and WNBA. Eventually, her schedule as a referee became so demanding that it was clear she could not continue doing both jobs. Meanwhile, she was accepted for U.S. Coast Guard Officer Candidate School, giving her another potential career path.

“I remember having a phone conversation with my mom (Sandra Watt P ’06), while standing in front of the White House after work, debating whether I should go into the military or stay a civilian and keep refereeing,” she says. “It felt like jumping off a cliff and expanding my wings and hoping I would fly. The wind caught me, and I definitely have soared since then.”

After officiating full time for a couple of years, Cruse decided to continue her education and enrolled in a sports management program at Columbia University in 2013. Taking one course per semester, she completed the program in December 2016 and received her master’s degree in May 2017. Instructors included officials with the New York Jets, the NBA and Anheuser-Busch, among others.

“That degree allowed me to understand more deeply how the business of sports works, especially with associations, organizations, conferences and league offices,” she says. “It gave me a well-rounded understanding of not only the game of basketball, but the business of basketball.”

While studying at Columbia, Cruse was invited to join a small group of WNBA referees to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement for the National Basketball Referee Association, comprising NBA, WNBA and NBA G League referees.

“I enjoyed the whole process of meeting alongside the NBA executives and WNBA executives and working with them to strike a deal,” she says.

Advocating for more equitable pay was a key issue in the negotiations, Cruse says, noting that semi-pro NBA G League referees can earn more than professional WNBA referees.

“The WNBA is the most elite women’s basketball in the entire world, and you have to go through the G League to get to either the NBA or WNBA,” she says. “So you should unequivocally be paid more as a WNBA referee than somebody who has less experience. I still advocate for this because WNBA officials are still paid below market rate, to this day.”

When she was a new college basketball referee, Cruse says she was discouraged from applying to officiate men’s games, which paid more. Since then, some conferences have begun paying referees the same amount for men’s and women’s games, but in others, a men’s basketball referee still earns about $1,000 more per game. (Editor's note: William & Mary has developed a plan to ensure gender equity in W&M Athletics. Read more at: magazine.wm.edu/gender-equity.)

There is also a significant gender pay disparity for professional basketball players. The average NBA player earns approximately 44 times what the average WNBA player makes, with a base salary of about $5.4 million, compared with about $120,600 for the WNBA, according to an NPR report.

The arrest of WNBA star Brittney Griner last year in Russia brought attention to the issue, because one way that professional women athletes supplement their income is by playing outside the U.S. during their off-season.

“Certainly it’s an unfortunate circumstance, and I am just grateful that she’s back home,” Cruse says of Griner’s saga. “I did see that she signed a year deal with the Phoenix Mercury, so she’ll be back out on the court this season. Hopefully we can get to a place in America where WNBA players don’t have to go abroad to earn the money they should be able to earn playing the sport they love in the country they call home.”

When they met two years ago, Renée didn’t follow women’s basketball and Cruse had no interest in musical theater. That started to change when each saw the other in their element.

“I love watching her perform and seeing the choices she makes on the stage and the depth of art and intelligence that exist in acting,” says Cruse, who attended several performances of Renée’s recent show. “She’s beyond talented.”

From across the room, Renée pipes in playfully, “Tell me more!” As Cruse picks up Darling, their Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Renée joins the conversation. Her introduction to women’s basketball was a 2021 WNBA Finals game Cruse officiated in which the Chicago Sky defeated the Phoenix Mercury to become league champions for the first time.

“A lot of what we do is similar,” says Renée, who was the first Black actress to play Elsa in a Broadway production of “Frozen.” “We both travel a lot. We both have people watching us. We have to put ourselves out there and keep our bodies healthy and able to do our jobs every night.”

One major difference Cruse sees is that despite being on camera in widely watched sports events, “my job is to perform my duties and be as inconspicuous as possible.” She mostly stays away from social media to avoid becoming a target for fans who are angry about a call with which they disagree.

When they’re not on the road for work or traveling for fun, the pair reside in New York City’s Manhattan borough. Cruse also visits her parents in Florida.

During the 2023 WNBA season, she’ll be working alongside fellow referee Isaac Barnett ’15, whom she has gotten to know over the past few years. The two spent concentrated time together in Florida during the 2020 WNBA season when concerns about the spread of COVID-19 prompted an isolation zone dubbed the “Wubble” — a mix of women and bubble.

“We had already bonded as W&M alumni and WNBA referees,” Cruse says. “He’s like a little brother to me.”

Barnett recalls seeing Cruse for the first time when he was a student watching television during winter break in a house on Jamestown Road.

“She was working a G League game in Sioux Falls, South Dakota,” he says. “At first it didn’t even register with me that she was a woman referee in a men’s basketball game. I remember being impressed with how incredible she was at controlling the game, and how sharp and polished she looked when signaling a foul. I thought, ‘That looks really good. I might steal that for myself.’”

Like Cruse, Barnett started playing basketball at a young age; he began working as a referee at age 13. After graduating from William & Mary with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, he followed in her footsteps as a G League and WNBA referee.

“When I finally got hired, she was one of the first people I was looking forward to meeting,” he says. “Of course we have that connection with William & Mary, and she automatically looked out for me.”

Cruse hopes more young athletes will become interested in working as referees — perhaps some of the William & Mary women’s basketball players she spoke with last fall.

“There is definitely a shortage of referees in general, certainly women referees and women referees of color,” she says. “I think there needs to be recruitment and programs to train potential referees and bring them up the pipeline.”

One of the challenges of the job, frequent travel, is also a selling point, Cruse says: Her work as a referee has taken her to Lima, Peru, for the 2019 Pan American Games, and to Mexico, the Czech Republic and Toronto, among other places.

“It’s another way to stay connected to the game,” she says, “and the game can take you many places around the world and can elevate your life.”