My officials won't blow their whistle

[Back In The Saddle]

I work with training a lot of new officials. I see two reasons for the lack of whistles:

• They are in the "hey, that was a foul...somebody should have called that" stage. It takes time to be able to recognize fouls/violations as they happen and for the whistle to become automatic. They will grow out of that with some experience.
• They are not comfortable with the result of blowing the whistle, which is that everybody stops and looks at them. Mark talked about this. Confidence building definitely helps. But so does teaching them what to do after they've blown the whistle. Most adults do just fine once they know what to do after the whistle (eliminating that uncomfortable, "Okay, now what?" feeling)

In my experience, anything that gets them to start blowing it helps. Once they've done it a few times, it begins to come a lot easier.

Juulie, I really like your suggestion. I have a training coming up in a couple of weeks and I'm going to seriously think about doing this.