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Originally Posted by REFVA
All I was saying, summer ball, rec ball is where you work on your mechanics. This is your training for regular season. Get into bad habits now, they are hard to break later. that is IMO.
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RefVA, I think that is a great attitude. It's the attitude I took when I first started officiating. I also think that you are exactly right about bad habits. If you allow them to develop as a young official, they are very hard to break later on when you want to advance.
Having said that, you have to see the other side of the coin. Many officials are already set in their ways. They aren't going to improve their mechanics, they aren't going to work on the little things.
Example from this past weekend. I worked with a very nice guy, a friend, a real quality member of his town. (He coaches basketball at the HS level and has coached younger kids for years.) He is a decent official, but I don't think he cares much about improving his HS schedule.
He has a bad habit on OOB calls to say who the ball went off of, instead of who's going to get the ball. In other words, very often he says, "Red!! You touched it. White ball!" I pointed this out to him after our set of games and he said (literally), "Yeah, I know. I don't care." Decent official, and very good person, but he's not going to move up. Should he be X'd off an assignor's list b/c of that? I don't think so.
If an assignor only used officials with your attitude and work ethic, he wouldn't have enough officials to cover all the Rec League, AAU, Men's League, HS off-season games that he assigns.
So in the winter, for varsity assignments where the W's and L's matter, the assignor can pick and choose the best and hardest-working officials. But in the summer, very often, the assignor just needs to get the games covered. It's not pretty, but it's a fact of basketball life.