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Ogden • Basketball coaches and referees are oil and water.

Ice cream and bacon.

Then there are Laura and Randy Rahe, who have been married for nearly 20 years and have two sons. Laura officiates Mountain West and WAC women's basketball games. Randy is a successful head men's basketball coach at Weber State.

In fact, since it was Randy who introduced Laura to the black and white stripes, he can hardly complain about the arrangement.

"I don't think about it," Randy said. "It's our life."

Aside from the jokes about sleeping with the enemy, both have used their points of view to enhance the other's profession.

"Having coached and being married to a coach definitely helps me," said Laura, who also teaches physical education at Weber State. "I get it. I see the pressure [coaches] are under. February is a hard month. Every single game is pressure-filled. If a coach makes a comment that isn't a typical response, I understand where they might be coming from."

Appreciation comes from the other side, too.

"She's taught me what officials are looking for and how they call a game," said Randy, whose team is in the midst of the Big Sky Conference playoffs. Weber plays Eastern Washington on Saturday. "It's helped me be a little bit easier on them. She's taught me the nuances of what they do.

"I say she's never missed a call. At least I'm smart enough to tell her she's never missed a call."

Building relationships is the key to both professions, which is why Laura can claim having issued just two technicals in more than 15 years of officiating Division I basketball games.

The same is true for the coach, who has three conference championships in five seasons, while still emphasizing the importance of the classroom to his players.

"They talk a lot of basketball stuff," said the couple's 11-year-old son, Luke, whose family also includes 8-year-old Kade. "They talk basketball all the time."

Basketball was the reason they met. Randy, an assistant coach at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, arrived early to the gym while on a recruiting trip to Basalt, Colo., and found himself watching a girls' high school game. As the game wore on, he realized he was watching the opposing coach more than the game.

"I didn't talk to her, but Laura had a really good player on her team and I told our women's coach," Randy said. "So I wrote her a letter, told her I saw her girl play and who I was, and [said], 'Hey, if you're ever in the area.' I'm sure she thought I was some crazy stalker."

Laura's reply, basically, was to buzz off. Sometime later, she wrote back, but Randy had moved on as a graduate assistant at the University of Colorado.

Laura's letter caught up with him months later, with a phone number.

"She was obviously desperate," Randy said.

There was something about that letter," she said. "[I thought], 'Hey, I'll take a chance.' "

By fate, both eventually wound up at Colorado State University, he as an assistant to Stew Morrill and she to get her master's degree. It was then, while Randy organized basketball camps, that he approached Laura to referee games.

"It was fun," said Laura, who decided to give it a try professionally. "The first year was painful. Then I realized they weren't yelling at me. They were yelling at the black and white stripes."

For Randy, his first experience watching Laura work one of her nearly 50 games a year was more personal.

"They were calling my wife all kinds of names, and I was getting ready to fight them," he said.

Now Randy sits away from the crowds. He knows the preparation Laura puts into her profession.

"She doesn't do it for the money," he said. "I hope other officials work as hard as she does. When she makes a mistake, it absolutely kills her."

Laura doesn't miss the pressure of coaching.

"As a referee," she said, "there are only a couple nights out of the year I don't sleep. As a coach, there were only a couple of nights I did sleep."