Beyond the Whistle: Dr. Skye Arthur-Banning on CP Football, Blind Soccer, and the Mental Game of Officiating

Every once in a while a guest's bio makes you sit back and think, am I doing enough? 😅That was me reading through Dr. Skye Arthur-Banning's résumé before we recorded this episode of Refs Need Love Too.

By day, Skye is a professor of sport management at Clemson University. By weekend, he's a soccer official heading into his 26th season as an NCAA referee, and he spent nine-years as a USSF national referee coach. In between, he's built a career in two of the least understood corners of officiating — cerebral palsy (CP) football and blind soccer — while also co-founding the U.S. Center for Mental Health and Sport. Oh, and he's gearing up to help run the CP Football World Cup landing right here in Georgia this October, just a few miles from the National Training Center.

We covered a lot of ground. Here are the highlights:

What's Different About a CP Football Match?

CP football (the name is a bit of a misnomer — it also includes traumatic brain injury, stroke, and other neurological impairments) is played 7-a-side on a smaller pitch, with roll-ins allowed as an alternative to two-handed throw-ins, and no offside rule at all, which keeps the game flying.

The part most fans never think about is classification. Every player is assessed and assigned a class — FT1, FT2, or FT3 — with FT1 representing the most significant physical impairment. Every team must have at least one FT1 on the field at all times (or play a player short), and no more than one FT3, to keep the competition level.

Where it gets genuinely complex for a referee is judging fouls like handball on an individual basis:

"If a player with cerebral palsy has some spasticity that brings their arm up near their shoulder, we would still consider that to be this player's natural position — and therefore not handling. But if that very same hand movement happened on their unaffected side, this would be handling. We're no longer just judging the overall scope — we're looking at the individual player."

Skye was blunt about one thing every new adaptive-soccer official should hear: these athletes aren't looking for pity, they're looking for the highest level of competition and the most professional officiating you can give them.

A World Cup Five Miles From Home

Georgia is about to host something extraordinary: the 2026 IFCPF Men's and Women's CP Football World Cups, running October 12–24 and October 14–23 respectively, at the new National Training Center. Twenty national teams — 12 men's, 8 women's — including the U.S., England, and Brazil, will compete on American soil for the first time in this tournament's history, after years of the event being held in Europe.

Skye will be bringing in international-caliber referees, including former Premier League and Championship official Keith Stroud, alongside officials from Argentina and Brazil, plus a strong contingent of local Georgia referees. For Skye personally, it's also the rare chance to have his own family in the stands instead of watching from a laptop — his ongoing joke is that they never know if he's at Costco or in Australia.

We'll have a dedicated follow-up post with volunteer sign-up information as it becomes available — the tournament will need everyone from ball crew to translators to match officials. (See contact information at the bottom of the blog)

 

Blind Soccer: The Loudest "Quiet" Game You'll Ever Watch

If CP football challenges assumptions about ability, blind soccer rewrites the rulebook entirely. Played 5-a-side with a rattling ball, blackout eyeshades on every outfield player (all classified B1, or fully/near-fully blind), and a fully sighted goalkeeper, it is — in Skye's words — one of the loudest games he's ever officiated. At any given moment, a player is parsing between 14 and 18 different sounds: the ball, teammates, opposing coaches, a guide behind the goal, and defenders who are legally required to shout "voy" as they close in to challenge for the ball. Fail to call it, and it's a foul — just like a trip.

"It's actually a really loud game. However, the fans are asked to be quiet, because we don't want to overload the players with having to sift through additional noise."

It's also a genuinely physical sport — contact between players is often a safety feature, not a violation, since touch is how they locate one another. And there's a built-in fair-play mechanism: rack up five team fouls in a half, and the penalty shifts from a six-meter kick to an eight-meter one.

Want a small taste of what these athletes do every match? Skye's advice: put a soccer ball in a plastic bag, tie it shut, close your eyes, and try to dribble.

The Part That Ties It All Together: Mental Health

Skye's newest chapter is the U.S. Center for Mental Health and Sport, a 501(c)(3) he co-founded after seeing how well mental health conversations landed with injured veterans in adaptive sport camps, and after studying Scotland's football-based mental health education model. Its ACT certification is a two-hour course, modeled on the accessibility of a CPR class, that gives coaches, parents, and athletes the tools to start a conversation when someone might be struggling. Partners now include U.S. Youth Soccer, AYSO, several NCAA programs, and the New York Jets.

The numbers are sobering: one in five Americans experiences a mental health disorder in a given year; among college-age students, it's one in three.

That same lens has changed how Skye referees:

"When I'm having a conversation with a player who's dissenting to me, the first thing that goes through my mind now is: how do I de-escalate this? Because I don't know what happened to them this morning."

It's advice worth carrying onto every pitch we work, at every level.

Huge thanks to Dr. Skye Arthur-Banning for the time, the passion, and the reminder that there's always another way to stay in the game you love — whether that's on a CP pitch, a blind soccer field, or in a conversation that helps someone get through a hard day.

How to Get Involved

• CP Football / adaptive soccer: Reach out to your state or regional soccer association, or contact Skye directly at skye@mentalhealthandsport.org. Youth programs run through cpsoccer.us, and Georgia-area folks can connect with CP Soccer Atlanta.
• Blind soccer: The national governing body is the U.S. Association of Blind Athletes. Watch for international friendlies against France in Colorado Springs this October, and coaching clinics in Miami later in the month through Lighthouse for the Blind Miami.
• Mental health training: Learn more or donate to the U.S. Center for Mental Health and Sport.
• 2026 CP Football World Cup: Follow tournament updates at ifcpf.com — watch this space for our dedicated volunteer-opportunities post.