The NBA game moves at breakneck speed. Life, too.
Eight years after graduating from Millersville University and six years after refereeing her first high school game, Ashley Moyer-Gleich was working as an NBA official.
That was 2018. The Cedar Crest graduate just completed her sixth season in that role and on April 25 became just the second woman to ever work the playoffs, when she was part of the crew for host Orlando’s 121-83 decimation of Cleveland. (Violet Palmer had been the other woman to ref the postseason, having done nine games between 2006-12.)
Understand this is not the path Moyer-Gleich envisioned for herself. Her degree from Millersville, where she started 87 games for the women’s basketball team over four years, was in biology. Her goal was to work in sports medicine. She had no interest in officiating.
But once steered in that direction, she quickly grabbed the wheel. And now she is careening along at such a rate, sometimes she’s a little amazed herself. She said in a recent Zoom interview that she contemplates her journey “quite often,” that she can’t quite believe the momentum she has gathered.
“It happened so fast,” said Moyer-Gleich, who turns 37 in August. “And there wasn’t really time for me to process a lot of the opportunities that I was given.”
Dinny Kinloch, the Lebanon-based referee who years ago suggested to Moyer-Gleich that she take up the craft, called her rise “meteoric,” and attributes that to her commitment, conditioning and dedication. Also her coachability. Her mentor is veteran official Scott Foster, and like others in her shoes she often turns to retired ref Joey Crawford, now the league’s Director of Refereeing Performance, for advice.
Crawford, 72, was an NBA ref for 39 years, ending in 2016. He first saw Moyer-Gleich working a summer camp a few years back, and was immediately struck by her.
“She just had presence,” he said. “All the mechanics and calling plays, we can teach that.”
But self-assurance and commanding the court? That was already part of her toolkit. That’s at least in part due to the fact that she had been a star point guard in her younger days, scoring 1,375 points at Cedar Crest and finishing her MU career with the second-most 3-pointers in school history, while playing on teams that won 23 games or more her last three seasons; her senior year (2009-10), the Lady Marauders advanced to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Division II tournament.
That was her foundation, then. That no doubt gave her a leg up on those who might succumb to the slings and arrows invariably directed toward those wearing stripes.
“When you first get in, you’re blown away, how little the coaches and players believe you,” Crawford said. “That’s what blew me away when I came in. I said, ‘Am I really this bad?’”
For that reason Crawford often finds himself trying to buck up young officials: Do not let them shake you, much less break you.
“You got here for a reason,” Crawford tells them. “There were a lot of people who liked what you did – not just one person or two people. There were a lot of people that liked how you performed, so you can’t allow them to shake your confidence.”
The rest is a matter of education and experience – learning the letter of the law from the rulebook and the spirit of the law from those with whom you work, while also developing a feel for the action that swirls around you.
“I think the general public thinks that we’re kind of just out there, floating or deciding when we want to make a call or not,” Moyer-Gleich said. “There is such a craft, such a knack for what we do. You’re constantly thinking of what the next thing is.”
It is, she said, “like playing chess in your mind. You’re constantly telling yourself, like, what’s coming next, what to be prepared for, what you’re looking for. And to me, it’s thrilling. … It challenges you.”
She has spoken before about the need for a referee to speed up one’s eyes – to anticipate the flow of play and where she needs to be looking.
“It takes time,” she said. “And the speed of the game, I mean, it’s not like you can do it in the game because there’s so much going on.”
So she studies video. She confers with Foster, Crawford and others. And she keeps her goals in mind. She wants to work deeper into the playoffs, having been part of that first-round crew this season – “a pinch-me moment,” she said – while also serving as an alternate for three other games in that round. She wants to be part of a Finals crew. She wants to be the first female crew chief.
“You keep pushing yourself,” she said. “It’s always a work in progress.”
She recalled being seated on the MU bench at some point in 2011 or 2012, either as a volunteer assistant or graduate assistant to then-coach Mary Fleig, when Kinloch suggested she try reffing during a break in a game. He remembers it more as a chance meeting, away from the court, when he did so.
Whatever. He knew of her, having called some of her games as she was coming up. He also knew her dad, Dave Moyer, who played at Lebanon High a few years after Kinloch did, on the Sam Bowie teams in the late ‘70s.
“Her father and I played some pretty spirited rec-league games against each other,” Kinloch, 70, recalled with a chuckle.
Kinloch, an official for over 40 years while running a marketing company, Fresh Creative, in Lebanon, had always been inclined to pay it forward when it came to his side hustle – to encourage others to enter the field, and support them when they did so. And so it was with Moyer-Gleich, who was further encouraged by Fleig. The former coach, who retired in 2020 after 30 years on the job, described her one-time protege as “an All-American kid,” as a woman who seemed destined to succeed, no matter her chosen path.
“She’s hard on herself,” Fleig said. “Like any other tough kid, she just expected a lot.”
After passing the officials’ test in 2012, Moyer-Gleich began working Mid-Penn Games. The following year, she was doing Division III women’s games. The year after that, she moved up to Division II, and the year after that she was in Division I.
Her big break came during the ’15-16 season, when NBA scouts approached her after a game at Lancaster Bible College and wondered if she might like to jump to the pro ranks. She did, and was immediately thrust into the rough-and-tumble world of the NBA Development League – soon to be rebranded the G-League.
A journeyman player named Larry Drew II once described the players in pro basketball’s minor league as being like “crabs in a bucket,” trying to climb over each other, en route (they hope) to the NBA. The competition, between teams and within them, is fierce. As a result the league can be a challenging place for someone who has “kind of a docile personality” and is “not a loud speaker,” as Moyer-Gleich said of herself.
She went so far as to admit she had “shellshock” at first.
“I wasn’t used to refereeing men – grown men – and men who were fighting for a job, and fighting for their livelihood, fighting to make it to the NBA and provide for their family,” she said. “And that’s real. And you have to have some type of an awareness of that, because tensions get high. People get aggressive and if you’re just out there, not realizing that they’re out here working the job … you can just get steamrolled.”
By her own estimate, it wasn’t until at least halfway through the ’16-17 season that she felt comfortable working in the G-League. She spent the following season there as well, then did WNBA games in the summer of ’18 before ascending to the NBA.
That wasn’t a smooth transition, either.
“I struggled my first season,” she said. “I did not perform well but that’s just the nature of what the business is. You’ve got to go through those learning curves and fight like hell to come out on the other side.”
Crawford found her self-awareness refreshing, not to mention promising.
“That is what makes her good,” he said. “The referees that don’t know when they’re bad, that’s why they’re bad. The referees that are good know when they’re bad, and then they can improve on it.”
She has continued to progress, while experiencing major life changes. She married fellow ref Johnee Gleich, who does Division I games, in 2015, and the couple welcomed their first child, a boy named Melecio, two and a half years ago. Ashley admits to “mom guilt” at times because of her schedule, but both sets of grandparents live not far from the couple’s Enola home, making childcare manageable.
Meantime, Ashley has negotiated the highs and lows of her profession. She became the subject of a viral Internet video in 2021, when she supposedly had the following exchange with Dallas Mavericks star Luka Doncic during a stoppage in play:
Luka: “There’s a foul!”
Ashley: “What foul?”
Luka: “Fouling in love with you.”
“For clarification,” she said recently, “that was not said. Luka did not say that. That’s someone being clever. The players do not talk like that. The internet will always win, so it was cheeky. Whoever came up with that, it was cheeky. There’s worse things that I could go viral for. The players are so professional, and for the most part, very respectful. They’re not worried about me. They’re out there, trying to win basketball games.”
And she will keep moving along, as rapidly as ever. Recently she was one of the guest speakers at the District Three referee clinic at Central Dauphin High School. 55 would-be refs attended, she said, including a young woman who reminded her of herself. Moyer-Gleich’s new acquaintance had also played in the Pennsylvania Conference, at Shippensburg. She too was a mom. And she’s looking to follow in Moyer-Gleich’s footsteps.
Which is, in fact, one of Ashley’s other goals – to blaze a trail, and inspire others. There are still miles to go, still much she would like to accomplish. Now it’s a matter of who she can bring along on such a rollicking ride.
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