assigning question
 

Someone I know moved to AZ (highly regarded and respected) to do high school basketball in the Tucson/Phoenix area. I understand the state assigns officials. Where I'm from individual conferences pick an assignor (pay him/her) and they assign officials to games.

I'm curious those of you who have moved from one state to another what has your experience been? Has it been postive or negagtive. What were your expectations? eg. Did you expect to start at the bottom and work your way up or did you expect to stay at the same level or something in between?

I moved to AZ (and then away again), but felt like I was treated very fairly in Phoenix. You are initially assigned a ranking that is just for officials who transfer into the state and being a state with a large influx of people, they get a lot of transfers each year. They hold a scrimmage prior to the season (1st or 2nd week of Nov) with two teams participating where the transfer officials can show their stuff on the court. It was a game situation and we wore our full uniforms. The GPBOAC (the governing body for officials in Phoenix) had a committee there to watch and rank officials on the spot and the AIA assigner was present too. You were assigned a random partner and did a full quarter (with a stopped clock).

I thought it was perfectly fair and I was assigned right were I thought I should be. I was afraid that I would be assigned games at a lower level than I had worked for the previous 10 years, but that was not the case. In AZ, you have a permanent partner and that was a little difficult to deal with because I didn't know the officials and they didn't know me, so i worked as a floater for the first half of the season. At that point, I filled in permanently for a guy who broke his ankle. It was overwhelmingly positive for me.

I moved from Iowa (Des Moines) to Colorado, and have been treated more than fairly, I think. In Des Moines, the varsity games usually involved permanent partners, even though they were assigned by a the association's assigner. JV was "random" partners.

In Iowa, the conferences and schools decided how to choose officials. Some of the larger school conferences used assigners; where as the more rural schools tend to hire their own offiicals. In Colorado, every school is assigned to a region whose assiciation does all the assigning. I like it better this way; it seems easier to break in for a variety of reasons.

Here, it's all random partners. My first year here last year I had 3 varsity assignments in the smaller schools (driving up to two hours one way) with some more experienced officials to guage my ability and level. I thought it was very fair, to be honest.

Sounds like a great system.