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In response to the comments that everyone has made here, as a young official, I think it's very easy to get caught up in the praise that you will receive, especially at camps, and if you have talent and a desire to learn, and also when you're better than a lot of your fellow campers. The hard part is stepping up and encountering a situation where you might get some criticism and you are not one of the elite campers. That feeling is not a great feeling, and that's where the strong support network, and things outside of officiating come in. It's very easy to get caught up in the praise and put everything into officiating when you're being told how great a job you're doing, but what happens when you've invested everything into something and you hit a bump in the road. In order to continue to succeed at that point, you need other things to help you keep a positive mindset that is necessary to overcome those obstacles. That's why I think the most successful officials always say officiating in not priority #1 in life. There's too much pressure already on us than for us to be impacted on too personal a level by failures on the court.
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