AFL Central Victoria affiliates will join football leagues across the country this weekend in recognising the important role umpires play in our game during community umpiring round.
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The celebration, formerly known as umpire appreciation round, comes as AFL figures reveal 55 per cent of umpires eventually leave the game due to abuse.
Bendigo Umpires Association chairman Craig Findlay said umpires would always be a necessary part of any game of football.
And while relations between those officiating the game and those in the crowd had come a long way in the past 20 years, he said there was "still some ways to go" in terms of those who persisted with umpire-bashing.
"It's still one of the contributing factors why new or younger umpires give it away after one of two years, it's fairly daunting for some kids to put with some of the abuse they do," he said.
"Umpires are a very diverse group too, young girls, women, school kids.
"Some field umpires are 16 - our oldest goal umpire is 81 this year.
"It's a range of ages and the football public need to respect the people they are yelling out at.
"For us, we need to educate people about what's involved in being an umpire."
Members of the umpiring fraternity took on a role of a different kind on the hallowed Queen Elizabeth Oval turf on Tuesday, starring in a new television commercial to air shortly on Channel Nine.
While umpire retention has historically posed some issue for the BUA, recruitment in recent times has been more fruitful.
A new partnership has resulted in umpires from the former Northern District association officiating in games in the northern part of the North Central league and also the Loddon Valley league.
"That's really eased the pressure on our numbers, but our own recruiting has been pretty good too," Findlay said.
"We're up to 204 members at the moment - the last couple of weeks we've got a lot of boundary umpires, students from university and school taking it up.
"It's encouraging, we just need some flipping over from boundary umpiring after a years or so, into the centre and taking up field umpiring."
Community umpiring round will extend to this weekend's round of AFL matches, kicking-off on Friday night at Etihad Stadium, with St Kilda playing Greater Western Sydney.
