Sportsmanship problems in AZ

[Rich]

Originally Posted by Camron Rust

As a caution from Oregon, which switched to 3-person recently, there will be problems if everything switches at once....even larger chunks. You're not going to have enough people with 3-person experience to transition smoothly. You'll have a lot of crews with little to no 3-person experience and they're going to struggle for a while...calls with be missed and 3-person will appear to many coaches/ADs to be worse than 2-person. We tried to move ALL varsity officials into 3-person all at once. There were (and continue to be) a lot that just are not getting it....we brought it in too fast and too broadly. You're going to have a lot of veteran officials that don't adapt to it very well, if at all.


If I were to recommend a transition plan, I'd suggest you figure out how many people have solid 3-person experience (essentially your college officials) and limit the number of games that will be 3-person on any given night to no more than about 60-70% of that for the first year so you can have one of those (or two on big games) on every 3-person game...as the R.

Select U1's that have some 3-person experience, but may not have a lot (newer college officials perhaps). This allows you to introduce 3 person to 1 completely green official per game and having others that can lead them.

Limit the number of officials new to 3-person to about the same number as those with solid experience. Once you go 1-2 years with that, the people that were U1's will be ready to be R's with 3-person and many of those officials new to 3-person will have enough to be the U1 on most 3-person crews and even be the R on some. You can then add another large group of officials.


I think that by phasing it in, you'll be able to better keep the quality high and keep your schools/coaches from revolting.

I also think that schools/conferences need to realize that there will be growing pains.

Personally, I would prefer making the change all at once at the varsity level and have considerable training prior to and during the transition -- and don't let the schools complain too loudly for a few years.

Why? If I wasn't in that group of officials getting to work the bigger games that I might have worked for a while because I wasn't in the "chosen" group, I might simply walk away.

I had a few veteran but marginal officials decide it wasn't worth it to learn 3-person and asked if we could just stay two and pay more -- those people I was happy, in the end, to see retire or drop back to local JV/FR games.