Quote:
|
Originally Posted by M&M Guy
Anyway, back to the issue at hand - I would prefer the clinician would've stepped in and corrected the mistake, then reamed the officials afterward. I understand the reasoning of letting them do the game, and waiting to critique, but the teams have also spent money to be there, so they have every right to expect the game to be officiated fairly. The teams should also know the officiating situation going in from the organizer - some camps use rec-league refs, some combine the camp with an officials' training camp, some use local HS refs, etc. If the teams know this is also a training camp for officials, they would understand the clinician stepping in and getting the mess straightened out.
|
I'm in the camp of letting the officials handle it w/o clinicians intervening.
The officials are there to learn. They need to learn to deal not only with the basic calls but with situations that they create when they screw up. With it basically blowing up in their face, they will never forget it....and neither will any other official that was paying attention to what resulted.
Sure, it wasn't a perfect outcome for the team. However, they didn't spend their money just to play; they're there to learn too. The same thing can just as easily happen in a regular season game and there would be no one to bail out the refs...no one to intervene and smooth things out. Camp is a place for the teams/coaches to also learn to deal with adverse situations....not just learn how to run plays.
The way it played out, the officials, the coach, and the players all learned something. If the clinicians had fixed the problem, the coach and players would have not had the opportunity to learn something. Now, hopefully, they'll find a more appropriate way to deal with such an error...something better than screaming at the refs. After all, it was a correctable error that could have been addressed by requesting a timeout. And, given that the other two refs knew what it should have been, it very well would have been fixed without incident. (Never mind that the other two refs, knowing a mistake was being made, should have stepped in right away and never let it get to that point.)
It's a lot like raising kids. They learn a lot more from an occassional failing (even a big one) than from someone making sure they succeed.