[Camron Rust]

Originally Posted by Stat-Man

At camp last summer, only 12 officials signed up. So, we had four crews of three for the entire day.

The schedule (games from 8a-8p) was such that a crew would do three games followed by a break before doing three more.

It wasn't too bad, but partway through the day, one of my partners had to leave early, leaving a crew of two for the next 2½ games. Thankfully, the observers for those games were sympathetic and let my remaining partner and I know that as long as we did our best, they weren't going to critique us unless we missed something very obvious.

With what was supposed to be our last break of the night, my partner were called to fill in on another court instead (so much for dinner). thankfully, we had a third official join us, so it wasn't too bad. The last game of the night was a championship game that went down to the wire. Despite being sore and tired, it was a fun game to officiate.

For the day, I officiated 11 games in 12-plus hours. While i enjoyed the chance to learn 3-person mechanics and get valuable feedback, I'm in no hurry to officiate that many games again.

What that camp should have done was hire out a few of those games to local officials so that you would not be left working more games than would be instructive. Instead, they pocketed the money the teams paid them to have the games covered and had you work them all, essentially for free. Working 8 games a day is not a learning environment nor a reasonable way to get evaluate (at least the evaluators recognized that).