Coaches & Officials Meeting

[Raymond]

Originally Posted by SC Official

The coaches that complain the loudest about officials not communicating are typically the whinier coaches who spend more time officiating the game than coaching (in my experience). There are coaches who want an explanation on every play or who want to spend the whole game talking to us, and when we don't fall into that trap they act like we are poor communicators. There are coaches who think that every time they get a T that it is a consequence of poor communication from the official. So while it's all well and good that communication is important to coaches (and officials), the reality is that our definition of what it means to be a good communicator from an official's standpoint is sometimes (often?) contradictory to what a coach's definition is.

Well, in the case of the D3 supervisor, his asked the 12 HCs would they rather have an official who is a great communicator or an official who is a great play caller. By 11-1 the communicator won out.

We can poo-poo this all we want, but at the college level coaches do have influence with supervisors. If a veteran college supervisor (who is also used as a video observer for major conferences) feels it is important, I'm not going to act like I know better.

And, as some of you like to do, it doesn't mean a great communicator can be a crappy play-caller. What it means is that a great play-caller is going to suffer if he is a crappy communicator. And a 100% of the time when I hear discussions about veteran big-time officials whom I think are not that good, I find out that official has a great reputation for communicating and running a game.