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As one who is involved with youth sports, I believe there are many very qualified officials who only officiated youth sports for a variety of reasons (not for the money), one being that their regular job and or family does not permit them the time to officiated anything but youth sports during weekends. I myself could not work anything except youth sports for a number of years due to the amount of travel required from my day job. About 5-6 years ago, this changed and allowed me the jump in the fray of HS BB. I feel very fortunate that I was given the opportunity to jump into HS BB and now have the passion to work hard and be given the opportunity to be assigned higher level games. Every year I have been my schedule has included a larger percentage of varsity level games and would hope within the next 2 seasons to make the playoff list. This does not make me any better that "youth officials". I know that working all those "youth games" prepared me to take the next level. I have tremendous respect for those youth officials because they expose themselves to more explosive situation than we will ever see. They rarely have game site administrators and deal coaches and parents think that they only reason they are working there teams or child's games is for revenge. Let's give thanks to those youth officials because if they do there job right, it will make our job that much easier when these players make it to high school!
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