Observation: Impediments to Moving Up

[JRutledge]

Originally Posted by Rich

With the exception of one coach who complained about everyone, I had two complaints about officials the entire 2014-15 season. 38 programs. Let that sink in.

It's HS basketball.

People need to realize this is HS basketball, not a smaller scale version of D1 basketball. I take my assigning seriously, but I'm serving the HS game.

OK, but what does that have anything to do with what we are talking about? It is likely that HS basketball in your area does not care about those things. But they care about all kinds of off the court things here.

HS basketball is not void of worrying about things like how an official looks or if they can keep up or if the officials are used to working bigger schools (Usually city and suburban schools) compared to smaller schools (Usually rural and smaller and less ethnic areas).

And I can tell you the top guy that went to the University of Wisconsin (Madison) came from the suburbs of Chicago (Lisle, IL) and the assignor to his conference very much considered who worked that conference based off of all the things we talked about. If he didn't, he would not have a job, considering that the league was a private school league of Catholic schools and often played teams from the city in non-conference shootouts where teams from the suburban area played city teams. The demographic of the officials right or wrong mattered to those schools and those situations.

Peace