Quote:
Originally Posted by ilyazhito
Raymond, Rich, you're exactly right. There is not enough systematic training at the high school level. Some states make camp attendance a playoff requirement, but it appears that not enough officials go to camp even then. If local associations are able to put on camps and on court training sessions, either on their own or with state support, the quality of officiating will increase, because officials will have more practice. As of now, most officials only get game experience, so if all their games are 2-person (MS, Subvarsity, and rec games for non-varsity officials), how will they learn enough 3-person to become competent enough to do varsity games? If states require camp attendance every year (whether the local association, HS at the state level, an independent teaching camp, or a college camp), and provide some source of scholarships/support local association camps, more officials will be better trained, and we won't see a's extreme of a drop-off from varsity officials who know 3-person to newer varsity officials and JV officials who don't.
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Sounds lovely, but there are plenty of officials who would give it up altogether rather than going to camp every year. You cannot force officials to be more invested in this job than they want to be. You can run them off, but that doesn’t help the shortage at all. We already sacrifice a lot of time and money. A lot of people are not going to spend more time and money going to camps over the summer, being away from work and family without making any money. We only get paid for the games we work; at some point the unpaid time devoted to officiating becomes too much.
And what about college officials? Should they have to go to a high school camp annually? You’d have an uprising from the high school guys unless the requirements were the same for the college officials working high school, and you’d have college guys quitting left and right before going to a high school camp. And I wouldn’t really blame them.
We have recently started requiring camp attendance once every three years in SC, and even with that minimal requirement we have had many people quit. It might seem minimal to me, but the bottom line is officials aren’t willing to do it.