COVID Aftermath ...

[Stat-Man]

Basketball officials' numbers were definitely down this year. A number of officials opted out because of COVID, others sat out because they didn't want to wear masks while officiating, and many who were debating retirement from officiating finally found themselves a good reason to finally retire.

For basketball, this meant that many sub-varsity crews would work both the freshman and JV game at the same site. On occasion, a crew might be assigned a JV/Varsity doubleheader (with two of the three varsity officials doing the JV game) if the teams playing didn't have a freshman game. JV officials were also asked to stick around whenever possible to make sure the varsity game had a full crew. This is already done informally, but it was emphasized more this past season.

The shortage of officials was more apparent in the Spring, at least for baseball and softball. I was umpiring games for either sport any day that wasn't blocked for work or personal reasons with one particular day where I had a middle school baseball game at one site followed by a CYO softball game at another site. One of my partners told me that our assigner only had 2 baseball umpires for every 5 softball umpires in our pool of officials which I could easily believe because he sent an email out after a baseball game of mine was rained out to tell the host school not to make up the game the next day because there weren't any baseball umpires available.

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by Stat-Man

... many who were debating retirement from officiating finally found themselves a good reason to finally retire.

Bingo. Same here.