Two women in stripes - newspaper article

[Camron Rust]

Originally Posted by rainmaker

The problem in Oregon isn't that females are being pushed ahead of their abilities. It's that females with real abilities have been held back by the selection process and now that the selection process has finally started to deal with reality, high quality female refs are being put into their rightful places.

That is not quite true, we've sent qualified women officials to the top state tourney before...with the old process. There were two that I remember since I've been in the PBOA, one of them moved out of town and never went to the tourney again from her new area. The other is working D1 ball and gave up HS ball after going to the top girls tourney in her last year. They were good enough to overcome the main deficiency of the system (lack of votes from boys coaches).

There were a handful of others that woud have made it if they had stuck around and spent the same 10-15+ years improving and earning the repect of their peers that all other other tourney official had to do...but they didn't want to put in the time and effort.

Originally Posted by rainmaker

I know Camron will take issue with this. I don't care. It was way past time for these three refs to be working 5A and 6A tournament games, and they were a credit to their association. Hopefully, someday I'll be as good as they are, and I"ll be able to do the job, too. I say "hopefully" because now that we are actually making it possible for refs to be chosen according to their abilities and not by their social affiliations, I may have some shot at it, when I'm good enough.

The only thing that held Melodee back in the past was the lack of coaches votes. Since she only worked girls game, she was never going to get the vote from boys' coaches and is not likely pull enough votes from girls coaches to overcome that obstacle. She did get the 11th most votes (out of over 200 officials) from fellow officials and has consistently done so. Lea Ann was only a few spots behind that. Those two have been strongly recognized by their peers as quality officials in the vote on a regular basis. If we had only eliminated the coaches vote from our old system, these two would have gone to the tourney anyway...by the vote of a lot of men (including myself).

With our new system where the commissioner gets to pick 1/3 of the slots without regard to the vote, the obstacle of getting boy's coaches votes can be addressed by bypassing the vote altogether.