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Old Thu Feb 09, 2006, 03:36pm
Back In The Saddle Back In The Saddle is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: In a little pink house
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I'm a big fan of officials camps. However, there are a couple of kinds. One is the tryout or exposure camp. The point of these camps is to strut your stuff and get seen (and hopefully hired) by supervisors. Often there is little, if any, feedback given at these camps. Probably not a good fit for a first year official.

Another kind of camp is the teaching camp. There will normally be a clinician or two at each game you work who will talk to you before and after the game, and at breaks. The purpose is to help you improve. And if you'll take the advice and really try it, you will improve. IMHO this is one of the best things you can do to progress as an official.

Try to remember how much specific feedback you got from higher level officials during this past season. Your partners normally have their hands full with their own duties. So partners don't often have much feedback, unless you did something noticably wrong. Often times the varsity guys won't say a lot. If they do, great! But those times are usually few and far between. So over the course of a season you just don't get a lot of feedback.

Now imagine you spend two or three days, work 6-10 games, and there is an experienced, knowledgeable official watching everything you do and giving you more-or-less immediate feedback. During a timeout he asks you to try something that may help you get a better look. 30 seconds later, you're back on the court trying it out for yourself. Perhaps the game is getting a little out of hand, and you're not sure what to do about it. At the next break, there is somebody there who can give advice on what to do to clean it up. Maybe there are things in your mechanics or mannerisms that you don't even realize are causing you problems, but the clinician will pick up on it and bring it to your attention. I usually come away from a teaching camp with enough things to work on to keep me busy for the coming season.

Just my $0.02
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