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Originally Posted by SmokeEater
I can't say that it did. I started officiating when I was in High School way before I even had an incling to become a firefighter. I do think that my confidence is directly related to my ability to effectively do both jobs however.
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Hmmmmmm........
The reason that I asked is because locally we've had quite a number of fireman and police officers over the years officiate in both football and basketball. A lot of them have athletic backgrounds in those sports and they do have the availability needed to officiate with the shifts that they work.
This is just my own observation, and obviously it doesn't hold true for all of the fireman/cops that officiate. I think that their training is very helpful when to comes to the conflicts inherent in officiating. Fireman/cops are trained not to panic, to stay calm and relaxed, assess the best way to proceed if there's a problem, etc., and they seem (to me,anyway) to be able carry over this training into officiating. That's not true for all of them, of course. They may not be better officials overall, but they do seem better prepared in a lot of instances to deal with the inevitable conflicts.
Note that I'm not or have never been in those vocations. However, the guy that mentored me and put so much time and effort into developing me as an official so many years ago was a cop. Because of that, I may certainly be biased.
PS- I should also mention that I've noticed that one the other main professions that also seems to be related to officiating would be school teaching.