Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
It's a vicious circle.
People who don't work 3-person more than the occasional summer camp aren't going to feel comfortable. People who aren't comfortable are going to make mistakes, and coaches who see those mistakes argue they'd be better off with 2. The coach you talked to is right. If we don't have a third to get the off-ball stuff missed with 2 officials, why have a third?
What I don't see in this area are officials taking a third to JV or lower class games, splitting checks, and WORKING AT IT in an environment where, quite frankly, nobody cares. I know if I was a younger official coming up, I'd be doing this at every possible opportunity. And yet I'll work 50-60 varsity games this season and never see a JV game worked 3-person. And no freshman games being worked 3-person. And no weekend youth games being worked 3-person. And so on...
While I'm ranting -- I do work quite a few 3-person varsity games where people are clearly uncomfortable with it. They hesitate and then don't rotate when it needs to happen, they reach out of their areas -- or worse, they hold a whistle they should have because they figure someone else will get it.
If we're going to win this battle, we have to show we have a plan and are competent at every varsity level contest -- or why WOULD we get an extra official hired?
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+1. I was going to post something along these lines. We have a metro area of about 400,000 people with around 275 officials in our association and we serve quite a few schools. Only one conference (About 10 schools) use 3-person for every home game. Another conference lets the schools choose, and even then only a handful of those schools choose to use three. So we have about 15 schools that use three officials. It's safe to say that the vast majority of officials don't work 3-person very often, and yet a lot of them are thrown into it during the district and state playoffs with little experience and are uncomfortable.
The state only mandates that you work a 3-person camp during the summer if you want to work the playoffs, which for us consists of working about two camp sessions. It's good experience, but not nearly enough IMO.
Basketball is at least better than baseball when it comes to 3-person officiating. Baseball is an unmitigated disaster when the state throws three guys on the field for playoff games.