Quote:
Originally posted by ssmith
Greetings all. I used to umpire HS baseball in WI and I'm looking at getting back into officiating. I can figure out the baseball stuff but football has always confused me. I live in East Troy and am willing to travel around the southeastern/southern WI area to work games. Do I need to be a part of a crew or can I get into games as a single official? If I need to be a part of a crew, how do I go about doing that? Are there any associations in the SE WI area that I can join/go to for advice? My experience with baseball was that the better umpires didn't always get the varsity games. I worked some small college and land o lakes games but yet my partner and I got very few varsity games. How does this compare with football? Any help would be greatly apprecitated. Post here or email to me would be just as good. Sorry for the long post and thanks for your time.
Scott
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Scott,
I moved to Wisconsin in 2002. I have my own football crew and am a master level in baseball and basketball (means little in the real world, but Wisconsin people understand the levels).
Wisconsin, for the most part, doesn't assign through associations. Commissioners usually assign conference games and athletic directors usually assign nonconference games.
When I moved here, I put together an email detailing my experience as a basketball official and emailed about 100 athletic directors and about a dozen conference commissioners. I worked 16 varsity dates my first season here, about 30 the past 2 years, and have about 40 this season.
I had no problem working lots of varsity baseball -- I found a partner and, again, emailed the AD's and commissioners.
In football, I signed up and found a crew looking for an official. To work varsity dates in Wisconsin, you have to be on a crew. I worked 9 games with that crew my first season and started my own crew right after that. My crew worked 8 varsity dates in 2003 and worked (or will work) about 12 in 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007.
I'm not trying to make myself sound good -- I'm just laying some background to show you my success in understanding the system here and taking advantage of it (where else could a transfer come in and pick up a full varsity schedule sight unseen in any sport?).
(1) Look for officials associations. If you aren't bothered by driving a good distance, a good association is the SWOA in Madison (www.swoa.info). There you can network and try to get on a crew. If you're not on a crew, you won't work varsity football except as a very occasional fill-in.
(2) As a new football guy, though, I would be looking to get as many freshman and JV dates you could. Email the athletic directors, because most crews (like mine) have trouble finding 4-5 officials every Monday or Thursday night, so we rely on fill-ins to work with us on the JV/Freshman games and AD's usually recommend those fill-ins to us. For JV/Freshman, I never have to drive more than 20 minutes from the house.
(3) Go to
http://www.wiaawi.org/publications/directory.pdf and find all the schools within a reasonable driving distance of where you live (for me, I chose 120 miles for football, 100 miles for basketball, and 45 miles for baseball) and target those schools. Last season I spent about $60 for postage and sent letters to all those schools looking for basketball and football games (to be honest, I get more baseball games than I want as I work 2 college conferences as well, so if you are looking to get back into that, you should really put your name out with the schools since many conference commissioners don't handle baseball and the schools hire umpires).
To be honest, you can't use the "the best umpires don't get the games" excuse here even if that is the case because those umpires put in the work to get those schedules. It's up to you to build your own schedule. When I moved here, I *hated* the system. Now I wouldn't have it any other way.
--Rich
[Edited by Rich Fronheiser on Nov 1st, 2005 at 09:28 AM]