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They’re easy targets: black-and-white stripes to a riled-up home crowd are like bright red to an angry bull, except these guys are outnumbered and armed only with whistles. Games, entire seasons, even coaching careers, can turn on a single decision by one official.

At Montgomery County football games, those decisions are made by some of the 263 members (not all near-sighted) of the Washington District Football Officials Association. Maybe it’s fair to question the decision-making of the people who choose to don those vertical stripes. It’s certainly instinctual. But it takes more than two words — ‘‘You stink” — to sum up these guys.

‘‘I’ve been a fan of the game a long time, and I thought I knew the rules,” said Roger Barkan, a first-year WDFOA official. ‘‘But when you’re actually doing it from the inside, there’s a lot more going on than I realized. ... All these crazy rules, and you have to know where you’re looking all the time.”

Hunting zebras

The WDFOA provides officials for public high-school games in eight Maryland counties and the District of Columbia, plus the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference. That includes junior varsity, and can mean three or four games each fall weekend for some officials.

In charge of finding officials for those games is commissioner Al Ferraro, the former athletics director at Einstein High School and a football official for 47 years.

‘‘None of the principals wants to hear that there are just not enough people to officiate all these games,” Ferraro said. ‘‘There are four new schools in our area this year. That’s 24 people, plus the 15 I lost. Two came back. So I’ve got to get 37 new people to break even.”

Breaking even is barely enough. As few as three officials oversee some junior-varsity games. In Montgomery County, varsity contests feature five-man crews, as opposed to the usual six.

Friday night is one thing; Thursday and Saturday can be even trickier. On Thursdays, many prospective officials find it difficult to leave work in time to make an after-school junior-varsity game. On Saturdays, 54 WDFOA members officiate college games.

The organization advertises in various publications, including The Gazette, for much of the year. Even now, three games into the schedule, the Web site www.wdfoa.org includes a section that says, ‘‘It’s never too late! We’re always looking for new officials.”

To meet the demand, Ferraro will take, almost literally, anyone he can get.

‘‘You can get a guy and dress him up and put him out there, and he’s a game official; so we play the game,” Ferraro said. ‘‘But how long before he’s a good, journeyman official? I’ve always said it takes approximately 100 games.”

Training zebras

It takes between four and five years for most officials to get 100 games under their belts. In the meantime, the WDFOA does what it can to send newer members onto the field with more than a whistle and a prayer.

For first-year officials, it’s an eight-week training course beginning the Monday after July 4. Classes meet for two hours, one night a week in one of two locations, either River Hill High in Clarksville or Gwynn Park High in Upper Marlboro.

‘‘We have to get these guys ready in eight classes to get out on the field,” said Chris Kates, the WDFOA’s training officer. ‘‘I’ll tell you right now, that’s woefully inadequate. But we can’t ask them for more than a day a week. We try to find a happy medium between what we need and what they can do.”

Classes are split between rules and ‘‘mechanics,” which means things like where to stand and which official has what call.

To cover the rules, Kates shows training tapes made by college conferences. In order to gain regular membership after a two-year provisional period, officials must have worked 35 games and obtained a score of at least 75 on a 100-question rules test administered by the National Federation of State High School Associations.

A decade ago, Sherwood head coach Al Thomas went through the equivalent program in Frederick County (which is not officiated by the WDFOA) to get a better understanding of the rulebook.

‘‘It makes you realize, the rules are pretty dad-gum complicated,” Thomas said. ‘‘Coaches have disagreements on judgment calls, but they do a good job with the rules.”

On the mechanics side, each class includes an on-field session. Trainees run through various scenarios, with their classmates posing as players.

Preseason scrimmages also provide a chance to face game situations, and for veterans to shake off the rust of a nine-month off-season. The training of an official is never-ending — the WDFOA also holds regular board meetings and mid-season follow-up sessions with newer officials — but it’s never as intensive as it is during the first year.

‘‘It’s a lot of information they throw at you,” said Barkan, whose day job is pursuing a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Johns Hopkins University. ‘‘But it’s really not even enough time to get all the rules and mechanics. ... Then there’s even more to learn once you get on the field that they don’t even talk about in class.”

Being zebras

Of this year’s WDFOA officials, half — 131 of the 263 — came in short of the minimum four years’ experience Ferraro estimates it takes to become a ‘‘good, journeyman official.”

Even more telling, the group with one year under its belt (28) is only about half the size of the freshman class (54). In other words, roughly half the people who try it don’t come back for a second taste.

‘‘Sometimes, it’s very thankless,” Ferraro said. ‘‘You have fun out there. Most coaches respect what’s going on. Most of the problems we have now are with fans; they don’t quite understand. Most of the time, they’re wrong.”

High-school officials face many of the same hardships as high-school coaches. The pay isn’t great: $64 for a game in Montgomery County. The hours and travel can be difficult for those with 9-to-5 office jobs, families or both. Montgomery is particularly difficult on that score, with its 6:30 p.m. start times for varsity games.

‘‘Pay them more, and make it so they can get to the game,” Magruder coach Doug Miller said. ‘‘When games are scheduled for 6:30 instead of 7:30 or 8, officials are coming in from work through rush hour. They’re frazzled. They have no chance to meet with the coaches to go over unusual formations. They’re putting their clothes on as they’re running towards the game.”

For some, it’s not worth the abuse they receive when they finally reach the game. Any veteran official has learned to deal with it.

‘‘That, for me — I’ve been doing this a long time, and it’s not an issue,” Kates said. ‘‘Coaches light me up all the time. I really don’t even hear it any more.

‘‘The two qualities an official needs, you have to have confidence in yourself and ... you’ve got to let it go.”

When assigning officials, Ferraro does what he can to make it easier on the less experienced. They are embedded in crews of veterans when possible, and given less demanding positions on the field; rookies do not wear the white hat of the referee, for instance.

Still, they are thrown immediately under the Friday Night Lights. They officiate from different parts of the field in different games, and often with a different number of partners from game to game. Not to mention the physical demands.

‘‘A couple of times when I had 70-yard sprints to get to the goal line with a wide receiver, I realized, ‘This is serious,’” said Jim Sullivan, another first-year official. ‘‘From a dead stop to a full run, 42 years shows. It doesn’t feel old until you’re doing that.”

Every year, veteran officials retire, or decide they don’t want to do it any more. Ever year, new schools open. The zebra hunt continues.