On This Day: October 31, 1997 — Violet Palmer Becomes the NBA’s First Woman Referee

On October 31, 1997, Violet Palmer walked onto the floor at Vancouver’s General Motors Place for the NBA season opener between the Grizzlies and the Dallas Mavericks, and nine minutes and fifty-two seconds into the first quarter she blew her whistle on an out-of-bounds call against Vancouver. It was a routine call in an otherwise unremarkable expansion-era game — except that the person making it was the first woman ever to referee a regular-season NBA game. Palmer was 33, a former Division II point guard turned career official, and that whistle ended a stretch of more than fifty years in which no major U.S. men’s professional league had let a woman call a game from the floor.

Dee Kantner (left) and Violet Palmer (right) — the NBA hired both as full-time officials in October 1997, the first women to reach the top level of any major U.S. men’s pro sports league.

A Decade of Proving It First

Palmer didn’t arrive at that whistle by accident. She grew up in Compton, California, played point guard at Cal Poly Pomona, and captained the Broncos to back-to-back NCAA Division II national championships in 1985 and 1986. From there she spent years working her way up through women’s Final Four games, WNBA contests, and NBA Summer League — the unglamorous circuit where officials log thousands of reps nobody outside the gym ever sees. In 1996 the NCAA offered her a spot officiating a Division I men’s tournament game, then pulled it after conference members objected to a woman working a men’s game. That rejection lasted less than a year. By October 1997 the NBA had hired both Palmer and fellow official Dee Kantner full-time, and the two women spent the following three preseasons working training camps and exhibition games so coaches and players would already recognize them before a single regular-season whistle blew.

NBA vice president Rod Thorn made the trip to Vancouver to watch Palmer work that opening night. “This is a night we’ll all look back on in 25 years and say, ‘That opened the door,'” he told reporters afterward. Palmer, for her part, kept it simple: “This is a dream come true, but it’s come about by a lot of hard work.”

The League Was Not United on This

Reaction split along predictable lines. Michael Jordan shrugged it off before it even happened: “If they can referee, they can referee no matter what sex they are.” Phil Jackson, coaching the Bulls at the time, read the move as deliberate institutional strategy: “I think [the NBA wants] to break the barrier. And that’s good.” Charles Barkley took the opposite position, telling reporters flatly, “I don’t think women should be in the Army and I don’t think they should be NBA refs.” Dennis Scott voiced a different worry — not that women couldn’t make the calls, but that players or fans might direct abuse at them that male officials never had to absorb.

Palmer spent three preseasons working training camps and exhibition games before the NBA made her hire official, giving players and coaches time to get used to her on the floor.

Barkley came around. Years later he told her directly: “Violet, I was wrong about you. I apologize.” That arc — loud skepticism followed by a quiet, specific retraction — ended up being the more common trajectory than anyone predicted on opening night in 1997. Palmer has credited her fellow officials more than the league office for how fast the scrutiny faded, saying the “mutual respect about what it meant to be on an NBA floor” from other referees helped her earn credibility with players by her third or fourth season.

Five Days Later, Kantner Got Her Turn

Palmer’s debut wasn’t the whole story. Five days after Vancouver, on November 5, 1997, Dee Kantner worked her own first NBA regular-season game, Atlanta Hawks against Philadelphia 76ers, becoming the second woman to referee at that level. A photo from that game shows her squared up against Hawks center Dikembe Mutombo, a seven-foot-two shot-blocker who towered a full two feet over her, mid-conversation about a call — the exact image the league’s skeptics had been picturing, except it played out as a normal exchange between an official and a player rather than the confrontation anyone expected.

Dee Kantner working her first NBA game on November 5, 1997, five days after Palmer’s debut — the two hires happened within the same week of the same season.

Nineteen Years, 919 Games

Palmer didn’t just survive the assignment, she built a two-decade career on it. She worked in uniform No. 12 for nineteen seasons, officiating 919 regular-season NBA games before a knee injury forced her off the court in September 2016. On April 25, 2006, she became the first woman to referee an NBA playoff game, working Indiana Pacers-New Jersey Nets. In February 2014 she became the first woman to officiate an All-Star Game in any of the four major U.S. pro sports. She was also on the floor for one of the uglier nights in recent NBA history — the December 16, 2006 Knicks-Nuggets brawl — and was one of three officials who ejected all ten players involved.

Palmer officiating in the mid-2000s, roughly a decade into a career that eventually spanned 919 regular-season NBA games.

She didn’t retire quietly from the sport either. In 2001 she launched her own officiating camp for young referees, and after stepping off the court she moved into NBA referee operations management rather than walking away from the game entirely. Cal Poly Pomona awarded her an honorary doctorate of science in 2022, and the 2025 inductions into both the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame and the LGBTQ Sports Hall of Fame put an official stamp on a career most of her critics never expected to last past that first difficult season.

Palmer with the current Cal Poly Pomona women’s basketball team, the program where she captained back-to-back Division II title teams in 1985 and 1986 before her officiating career began.

She has kept returning to that program ever since. In 2023, during the run-up to her Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame induction, Palmer visited campus and posed with a portrait of Darlene May, her college coach and the person she has credited with teaching her the court discipline that carried into officiating. The two ended up inducted into the same Hall of Fame, coach and point guard, three decades after the championship banners that still hang in that Cal Poly Pomona locker room.

Palmer holding a portrait of her college coach Darlene May during a 2023 campus visit tied to her Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame induction.

Where the Door Actually Led

The real test of Thorn’s prediction isn’t what happened to Palmer — it’s what happened after her. The NBA’s officiating staff now includes seven full-time women, roughly 8% of the 75-person crew, and both Palmer and Kantner have said publicly that the newest hires face nothing close to the scrutiny the two of them absorbed in 1997. That’s a slower and smaller number than “opened the door” might have implied at the time, but it’s a door that has stayed open for 29 years running, which is its own kind of answer to the players who doubted it would last one season.

Palmer working a Rockets-Kings game in 2013, sixteen years into a 919-game career that outlasted every prediction made about her on opening night 1997.

Watch: Her Career in Her Own Words

What stands out looking back nearly thirty years later isn’t that the NBA took a chance on Palmer and Kantner — it’s that the league never had to. Nothing forced David Stern’s office to hire two women into the most visibly scrutinized job in pro sports short of the players themselves. They did it anyway, in the same year the league was also quietly replacing officials who’d resigned or been suspended, and the gamble paid off specifically because Palmer refused to make it a one-season story. For a sport whose “firsts” usually get swallowed by the next week’s highlight reel, this one is still being cited every time a new official — of any gender — steps onto an NBA floor for the first time.

Sources

• Violet Palmer becomes first woman to officiate an NBA game — History.com — date, quotes, and game details from the October 31, 1997 debut.
• Violet Palmer — Wikipedia — career statistics, milestones, and biographical background.
• The Q&A: Dee Kantner, Violet Palmer talk trailblazing journeys as NBA’s first women officials — NBA.com — retrospective interview and current officiating staff statistics.
• Women Referees Answer NBA’s Call, A First For Major Professional Sports — The Spokesman-Review — contemporary player and coach reactions from October 1997.
• Violet Palmer, who broke the gender barrier for NBA referees, retires from on-court duties — NBC Sports — career-closing details and retirement circumstances.
• Groundbreaking ref Dee Kantner joins NC Sports Hall of Fame — North State Journal — Kantner’s November 5, 1997 debut game details.