Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
I've never, ever seen a guy wear a belt in a serious game in any place I've lived since the early 1990s who was a top flight official. When someone has the choice of wearing something that 100% of the officials who work at the top levels wear (on TV and elsewhere) and it's actually the standard wear for the sport, I just don't understand why you'd make a different choice.
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Then you have never lived in my little corner of Connecticut. The standard here, and I've served on the training committee for several years so I know that I'm talking about, is that officials have a choice of wearing belted, or beltless pants, and for that matter, pleated, or flat, pants. Of our 325 members, we only have about a dozen NCAA officials, and of those only a handful of Division I officials, and the college guys, universally, wear beltless pleated pants, however, not all of those guys are considered by either their peers, or by the high school coaches, to be our best officials. Of our dozen, or so, officials, who work the "top level" high school games around here, only a few are college officials, and with exception of those college guys, the rest wear both types of pants, in terms of belts, or pleats.
But things are changing. Back when I started 32 years ago, only the college guys wore the beltless pants, and, back then, nobody wore pleated pants. Now most of the "young guns" coming up choose to wear beltless pants, although the pleats haven't followed suit, for some reason.
We're a board that services high schools, and we're, for the most part, high school officials. Most of us really don't care what the NCAA guys wear on television. We watch how they officiate. We watch how they manage a game. We watch their mechanics. But we don't really care what they wear.
That's our local standard. I'm 100% sure that standards vary all over the country, state to state, association to association, NFHS versus IAABO, etc. I don't make fun of other's standards, and I see no reason why others should make fun of ours. We're old fashioned, but we're comfortable in our own skin.
For some reason, Connecticut was one of the last IAABO states to even consider a switch from the gray, and blue, to black, and white, jerseys. My local board was one of the last local boards in the state, IAABO, or otherwise, to make jackets mandatory. Almost all of our games are two person games. There is a reason why Connecticut is called the Land of Steady Habits. I may be a Red Sox fan, but I'm a Connecticut Yankee through and through.
In the immortal words of St. Ambrose, who in 387 A.D., after Saint Augustine questioned why the Church at Milan did not fast on Saturday as did the Church at Rome: "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."