Fun With Contact …

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by JRutledge

You work for an organization that tells you everything to do. It does not work that way where I live. So maybe this is hard for you to understand because it is a larger organization than a state organization that tries to define things for multiple areas and states. I do not get assigned by any one group that decides my entire fate as an official from the licensing to the post-season ... Often training is local and much smaller scale.

Things that I've learned as a fifteen year member of this Forum, that I really didn't know in my first twenty-five years as a non-Forum basketball official here in 100% IAABO Connecticut (officiating nowhere else, not even with a different IAABO local board within Connecticut):

There are a gigantic number of high school basketball officials that have absolutely nothing to do with IAABO.

Not all states have a single, monopoly-type organization (of any type of umbrella organization) that recruits, trains, tests, evaluates, certifies, and assigns, high school basketball officials. Many states have multiple such organizations.

Different doesn't always mean better, or worse, just different.

There's a basketball version of all politics is local.

There's a basketball version of when in Rome do as Romans do.

Despite the fact that it's been around for a very long time, and that it pretty much controls almost all (as a monopoly) interscholastic basketball rules, interpretations, and often mechanics, nationwide, don't expect the NFHS to be anywhere near perfect.

Also: Unlike the NFHS, and state interscholastic sports governing bodies, IAABO only deals exclusively with a single sport, basketball, only basketball, and nothing but basketball; and is the oldest umbrella organization in the country that trains high school basketball officials, with 15,000 high school basketball officials in several states. However, IAABO is now branching out (outside of the NFHS) to include FIBA (Canada), NCAA men's basketball, and NCAA women's basketball, a diversification strategy that I fear will dilute the product of what IAABO has always done best, training high school basketball officials.