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Baseball games have started as early as 2:30 in my experience. I have had to work a 2:45 private middle school basketball game, and public middle school basketball games in Montgomery County are scheduled to start at 3:15 PM (most usually start around 3:20). However, JV basketball games are at 4 PM (DCIAA) or later, with the varsity game (or games) following at 6:00 or later (MCPS does 5:30/7:15 for the JV/varsity schedule, DC has 4 PM JV/6 PM Girls Varsity/8 PM Boys Varsity. Private schools have Freshman/JV/Varsity with the 1st game starting around 4, or JV/Varsity with the first game at 5/5:30 PM).
Even though most subvarsity officials will never work varsity, I still believe that a valid approach for training would be to treat all officials in training as if they had varsity potential, and then choose the best of those in training to be added to the current varsity staff, with the next tier doing spot varsity assignments as needed. In this way, advancement would become more objective than subjective, because there would be evaluations of officials working, rules exams, practical tests, and other objective criteria to rank officials.
I wouldn't say that varsity officials do not work subvarsity games when available to do so, because their input would be very useful to the newer official that has a subvarsity schedule (I don't know how useful that would be to the veteran subvarsity official (5+ years with no varsity experience)). However, later start times would make sense for working officials, especially if the games are spread over a wide geographic area and travel is required.
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