[Texas Aggie]

I've been in several meetings with coaches as speakers and bringing in active coaches, in my opinion, is counterproductive. Usually, one side or the other misunderstands and then other coaches want to get in on it because they want their face time, influence time, or whatever. We had a big problem with this in a smaller chapter I worked in a while back. A coach came in; many of the officials thought he was there to tell us how to call his games; other coaches heard about it and demanded a time for them to come to our meeting, etc. Earlier this year, another coach came to our football meeting and a lot of guys just tuned him out. His presentation was weird, to say the least. Coaches are good at motivation and sometimes at general speaking, but rarely are they informative.

On the other hand, I'm a big believer that hearing from coaches does help, so I'd suggest retired coaches or ADs. They don't have the daily pressure and now have some perspective to take a look at what happened on the court/field and can be more instructive.

As far as other topics, one thing we did one year in a meeting after a big fight in a game the week before was to split up into groups of 3 and go over scenarios like we were working the game. This helped me get the fighting, flagrant foul, free throw, and ejection rules clear in my mind by actually applying them since we don't do that very often. You don't have to do fighting, but pick a topic area that's important but doesn't happen much and work through that process. Its also more fun for the officials than sitting around listening to lectures.