Intae Hwang Achieves Dream of Becoming NBA Referee After Moving from South Korea to the United States

With almost 20 years of experience and after almost 4 in the United States, Intae Hwang is ready to realize his dream. The whistler originally from South Korea was in fact officially promoted to the referees for the 2023-24 NBA season: a great achievement for him and his family, wife and two children, who in January 2020, before it exploded the pandemic, they decided to leave South Korea to move to New Jersey, America, 11 thousand kilometers from home, to pursue their lifelong dream.

“Officiating is a kind of addiction. After every single match, you feel so bad. People were shouting at you. I wanted to get better and better. I want to be perfect, but now I’ve learned from my lessons that we can’t be perfect. We can only be excellent,” Hwang said in an interview with the Washington Post. He, who began refereeing in his homeland in 2004, worked in the Korean league, in various FIBA ​​tournaments and then also at the Rio 2016 Olympics where he was noticed by the NBA which already in the summer of 2017 invited him to referee some matches of Summer League.

Then the big decision, moving with her family to Fort Lee, New Jersey, to follow an NBA program that also prepares and develops referees for the WNBA and the G-League. It was a paid course but it didn’t give the certainty of having the job: Intae Hwang left anyway and in the end he was right after 18 months of hard work. The Korean whistleblower showed up with the most experience of all, even if he had to get up to speed with the NBA regulations: he also settled in as well as he could, given that he speaks English very well, as well as Korean and also Chinese, Japanese and a little of Turkish, having refereed on 5 continents.

For Intae Hwang it won’t be an absolute debut because he had already refereed 7 games of the last regular season as a reserve, but now he can say that he is in effect a full-time NBA referee. And it is the first non-North American whistleblower: the first international was in fact the Canadian Matt Kallio, who joined the refereeing staff last year, in 2022.

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2023-10-11 15:01:36
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