Rich's area - Is it time to drop the 3-man officiating crew?

[SD Referee]

Originally Posted by Camron Rust

Some of his points were valid....moving to 3 means you need 50% more people to cover the same number of games or you need the same people go give 50% more of their time.

A lot of people can't give up 50% more time, so you ultimately need more people. Assuming you normally use the "best" officials with 2-person crews, that means the ones you need to add come from the next tier down, adding people that were previously working JV games to now do Varsity games. You have more officials on games that are not ready for those games. You can cover select games with an experienced crew, but not all, may not even most games.

It is certainly better at the top, but the big question is whether the 3-person system, across all games, overcomes the effect of adding a generally less capable official to most crews. When we switched to 3-person, who that was was patently obvious to anyone who had any idea of what was going on on the court. They tended to not know where to go and the call selection was just not the same. We knew that there would be growing pains for the first few years as many had to learn 3-person...most 3-person crews had 1 person with 3-person experience (typically with a college background), 1 that was familiar to some degree, and 1 that had no idea. We hoped that the benefit of the 3-person format would eventually overcome the hurdles. While 3-person is certainly better when you have 3 top-level officials, the jury is still out as to whether it is a net win across the board when you have a limited pool to draw from.

Our transition from 2 man to 3 man went much more smoothly. There were growing pains of course, but for the most part it went much more smoothly than some of you guys are describing. Not sure why that would be.