State talking points

[SC Official]

Originally Posted by JRutledge

Well, is it possible that these are issues that need to be addressed? I get wanting things to be addressed on the court, but would that not come from a different focus? For example, don't you have some kind of camps, clinics, trainings that can be used for on-court improvement?

You think a memo is going to go over well if they say, "The Lead in a rebound needs to move away from the lane to get a wider angle of rebound" if that is said in such a memo?

Peace

I didn't say they didn't need to be addressed. I said the SCBOA/SCHSL have never, ever paid as much attention to the quality we put on the floor versus all of this other stuff. Even at the "state-sanctioned camps," which only a small percentage of officials went to this past summer, were more about the clinicians pushing their own agendas and making money. Of course, you could say that's the typical camp business, but our governing bodies have never indicated a strong desire to actually make officiating better statewide like surrounding states have. Our system is a joke, but it's not going to keep me away from officiating...yet.

Originally Posted by Robert E. Harrison

Remember, SCHSL assigns all varsity games in the state and rates all 700 or so officials on a scale to 100.
I would keep the 100 question test. I think the answers should be set in concrete before administering the test though.
If SC is going to use the coaches input (ratings?), SC should throw out the lowest ratings or figure out someway to weight them to be fair. Also all games, should be filmed and put on-line so an official could challenge his rating to a committee if he/she feels their rating was unfair.
Coaches get to black list officials, officials get to black list official and official get to black list schools.

The exam always has multiple vague, poorly-worded questions that end up getting thrown out. So from that perspective, a 50-question test makes sense in terms of curtailing some of that. Problem is, with 70% being a passing grade, now officials can only miss 16 questions instead of 31. And the hard questions that trip officials up are not the ones that are going to be eliminated.

Adding a coaches' factor into our rating system would require a vote of the association, and I don't see it passing. With the state wanting us to penalize inappropriate behavior, it would make zero sense to implement a coaches' rating component, which IMO would cause LESS technical fouls to be called.

The president of the Coaches Association also said the peer ratings component of our rating system makes no sense. And on that point I could not agree more.