Quote:
Originally posted by LarryS
CYOButch,
You made one of my points for me! "I might be inclined to downrate officials who are pretty lenient in what they called under the basket because I coach girls and because I don't value the rough stuff inside highly. Conversely, my evaluation of an official who called a lot of contact would probably be pretty high." So, if the official is not calling the game the way YOU want him to call it, he gets a bad evaluation? Remember, not all contact is a foul. That is the point I was trying to make with the personal preferences of a coach.
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Actually, I'm just admitting that everyone has some kind of bias. Not all biases are wrong or bad. I am biased toward honesty, sportsmanship, etc. Many of the things we call "values" are our own cultural biases. That doesn't make them bad at all. But it does make it difficult for those who don't share those values to understand us. I know if I were asked to evaluate officials, I would go out of my way to try to be fair and even handed. I would do my best to avoid letting "personal" things intrude. But I also know that I believe that girls basketball is better off when the officials' calls about contact are tighter, acknowledging that not all contact is a foul. I have a lot of reasons for this belief, among them the fact that (in my experience) girls take contact from another girl more personally than boys do. Also, we (male) coaches tend to be pretty protective of our girls, so tempers can flare if we think our girls are getting hurt physically because of "no calls". As a result, to me, a good official is one who does his or her best to keep the contact under control. I do not doubt that however hard I might try, this view of girls basketball that I have would probably influence how I evaluated an official, even if the traits I'm talking about were not amongst those being formally evaluated. If this "bias" of mine is offset by another coach who likes to "let them play", so be it. The norms of the league will determine the results.
Your question about how many coaches could pass a rules test is a good one. My guess is that the number is pretty low. In my league it's probably higher than the norm because the league issues a rule book to each coach at the beginning of each season. I'm pretty sure that I could pass it, partiuclarly after hanging out here, but I'm kind of anal that way. I think all of us should know the rules well enough to pass the test because that would help us to be better coaches. It might also help shut up some of the howlers. (Like you said about coaching though, I know that I am a terrible ref when I do it during our internal scrimmages, and I would be a joke if I actually took the court. That job is just too tough!) I'm also smart enough to realize that whether I'm right about the rule in a given sitch, and the official of my game is wrong, the official is always right.
Of course a coach can evaluate the officials during the game. Isn't that what they're doing when they're howling?
Seriously, your point about that is well taken. The only time I notice that an official's mechanics are bad is when something is getting so messed up that it draws attention to it. I would never advocate that coaches be the only ones to evaluate officials. That would be just plain dumb.
I don't thik the cheerleading example carries to basketball very well. As I understand it, cheerleading is "judged" according to a number of factors, but many of them are highly subjective. While basketball officials "judge" virtually everything they see during the game, the do so at a very fine level of detail that has been expressly defined to reduce the amount of purely subjective judgment involved. I would place cheerleading judging along side figure skating judging as subect to highly variable personal interpretation. Heaven help us if basketball ever becomes THAT subjective.