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Originally Posted by Steve M
In addition to what Steve and Scott said - make sure that you attend the informal adult beverage get together. I found that the discussions that went on in that gathering were at least as benficial as the class & clinic work. Where else can you sit with several members of the NUS
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All good advice BigSig. However, like any other human endeavor, it can be very disappointing when it fails to meet your artificially high expectations.
I attended my first (and last) NUS three years ago. The evening registration offered nothing; just a bunch of the locals that had eaten all the pizza and were well on their way to consuming most of the beer by time I checked in.
The clinic was way oversold; the attendee vs clinician ratio was twice ASA’s recommended 25 to 1. So your individual repetitions in drills was halved. I remember leaving one particularly long and slow line, going down the hall to the restroom, and returning to my same place in the line.
The local/state associations used the clinic as a training program for rookie umpires. To some of us, it seemed as though 60% of the attendees were low on experience. This dumbed down the overall clinic.
However, I did pick up a couple good hints and was looking forward to the Saturday night dinner/social interaction with the clinicians. Surprise! The sponsoring group cut the day short by an hour and announced that
they and the NUS were going to dinner at a local restaurant. They invited us,
if we could find a table in the same restaurant! (Yeah right - picture 50 or more of us descending on a popular restaurant on a Saturday night!)
It was 4:00 in the afternoon and I didn’t know what to do. My money (clinic, travel, and hotel) was already spent, but at least I could recover some of my time. I checked out and traveled a couple hours to my brother’s home and enjoyed dinner and the evening there before heading home.
I am not bitter; it is simply that
my expectations were way too high. I’ve attended many district and state clinics, and they have been valuable. I assumed that a
National clinic would be for experienced umpires, with
content to match. That is a mistake! It is simply another umpire’s clinic. A little better, and a whole lot more expensive than local ones.
WMB