Strange Night

[cropduster]

Originally Posted by Chess Ref

I'm going to fall into the SME camp on this one.

Here's how my learning curve has gone so far in regards to whistle blowing .I am at the beginning of my 3rd year. Doing the JH/sub-varsity circuit.

Year 1 -I had a quiet whistle. I had heard and read all about this mysterious Advantage/Disadvantage. So unless it involved a fracture of some sort I passed. And if I deemed it a hairline fracture well that might get a whistle. Or maybe not.The advantage gained wasn't THAT BIg. So needless to say I didn't call alot........Consequences of that were my games got way out of control, lots of trainwrecks-that I didn't have the skills to fix, and screaming ,upset partners I mean coaches. Alot of the times not so much fun for me.

Year 2 - Starts out the same as Year 1. Varsity ref shows up for one of my JV games. Halftime asks if he could make some comments. His comments were blow that thing. Blow it till hades freezes over. Call everything. Anything and everything gets a whistle. Her ponytail brushes another player tweet. Tweet till your lips hurt.I did that for about 2 weeks. Then I started to learn about ADD/DISadv.

Now I call the obvious and most of the time I can make rational, logical whistles around ADV/DISADv. I am more confident, out of my last 30 games I have had only 1 go sideways on me. Partners and coaches have discussions with me instead of pleading for me to tweet that thing.

So instead of learning Adv/Dis I needed to learn to tweet and then move up the learning curve. The closet analogy I can come up with is I needed to know how to do fractions before trying to solve calculus problems.

I think when officials are starting out they are just blowing whistles . It is a baptism by fire kind of thing......

Pretty good advice. May not be the cure all for every case but I've seen some that it would be a very good "re-start".

barryb