My officials won't blow their whistle
 

Any advice on how to encourage my youth basketball officials to blow their whistles? I have a few that are a little bit gun shy.

Pay them a per-foul rate?



Didn't say you wanted good advice. :)

Organize a scrimmage where the players are going to work on having absolutely no contact. Tell the refs that they must blow the whistle on any contact at all. It's good for both players and refs.

What level of youth are we talking about...I am on a board for a local rec league that runs grades 3-8...as a ref, I spend 90% of my on court time officiating 5th-8th grade (rec and competitive league/AAU type level) with the occassional off season 16U AAU games...

Lower the level, the harder it is to call because there is so much you can call... My reallity with the lower level is that contact is A-B-C or D All of the above when it comes to fouls...

There are two schools of thought here. Call it if it happens, they need to learn the game and let some stuff go so they can enjoy the game. .the kids just are not understanding and coordinated sometimes to avoid contact and we can blow the whistle just about every trip down the floor at both ends...

When doing the younger kids 5th and lower for rec....I know I have far more tolerance for minor travels/shuffling of the feet...we tend to let a lot of perimeter contact go as incidental unless it really disrupts the dribbler and on shots, we call it pretty tight.

I can't tell if you're serious or not...

Which would you prefer?

Thank you.

Dan...you owe me a new monitor! HAHAHA! :D

Cute, Dan, real cute.

Tell them if they don’t get their heads out of their collective azzes, you'll bring in volunteer parents.
Tell them to eat before they come to the game so they don’t have to swallow their whistles during the game.
If you think the pressure is too much for them, have a group therapy session and discuss empathy or something.

Seriously, maybe get out there and ref a game with each of them. Do it three whistle, if you want. Get together with them during timeouts and intermissions to discuss individual plays. It might be that officiating isn't for them, who knows.

Well, seriously, of course officials shouldn't be blowing the whistle on any or all contact, but doing an exercise like this helps get them quickly through that not-blowing-the-whistle-enough stage of development. It only takes a few minutes of this for an official to learn to be unafraid of the sound of the whistle and to learn to look for contact. Then they can start to judge what to call and what not to.

Unless there are some girls, in which case use three whistle.

I've corrected the original, and will sentence myself (note the correct usage) to diet soda the rest of the day.

Most new officials have this problem due to the fact that they cant seem to tell what a foul may or may not be. The best thing to do is get them in a scrimmage and have an official run with them and tell them to blow the whistle. Once they get use to the contact, then they will be sort of comfortable. This is what was done for me when I got started. Have then just concentrate on blowing the whistle and nothing else. Just my 2 cents worth.

That's a little harsh. But, btw, how much pop do you drink in a day? Maybe to make the game better I"ll impose a sentence of just less total pop. You'll get the advantages to your health as well as your vocabulary.

Over the past 15+ years, I've trained quite a few HS kids to ref low level rec games starting with 3rd grade. It's my opinion that the reason they are hesitant to blow the whistle sometimes is not because they don't recognize when they should, but that they are relatively self-conscious or shy and don't want to draw attention to themselves. During training, I work on building their confidence to blow the whistle and let them know that if they make mistakes, it's not the end of the world. I tell them to work as many games as they can and try to match them with veterans for most of their first season. This seems to help a lot.

Of course, the kids who express an interest in officiating aren't usually the type who are extremely shy in the first place, thank goodness. That makes my job easier.

I tell them the more they work, the closer they will eventually get to being perfect, like me. :rolleyes:

When I first started I had the no whistle thingie. I was so focused on ADV/DIS that I called nothing , which made sense cause I didn't know how to apply ADV/DIS was on a BB court. Somewhere somebody told me to call ALL contact till it was painful and then I would figure out what contact was really a foul. It took me about, if I remember correctly, about 2 quarters.

I work with alot of brand new officials and just had a total new man. No rec,no adult, no nothing. I told him,in the 2nd qtr, to call all contact he saw. It seemed to help by the 4th he was calling the obvious, which was so much better than his 1st Qtr of no whistles.....

This is really pretty good advice...I guess it's easy for me to say ad/disad but I've been calling games for 7 years and understand it...I think I will use this with our new guys...Thanks Chess!

You mean, maybe my suggestion was a good one?? Wowee!

But seriously, a teacher/trainer will save the learners a lot of pain if they set this up in a scrimmage where the players also know what's going on, and have something to gain from it. It never hurts players to consciously work on having no contact, and it's best to do it when there's not a game on the line.

Actually, it was an empty sentence. :)
Most days now, I don't drink any. I'm quitting, and part of the method is to force myself to drink diet when I drink pop. I'm not a fan of the diet flavor, so it helps.
I probably have one or two cans a week now. Partly to lose weight and partly to keep my heart rate down.

Rainmaker, I wasn't trying to steal your thunder.:cool: I agreed with your advice but neglected to give you props.

PS does anyone know if I used props in the proper context ?

I got not thunder for you to steal. A good idea is a good idea. But, yea, you used "props" in the proper context. Although I think it's a little passe. I know I've moved on to the much trendier "snaps". :rolleyes:

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.

Thank you.

Good luck with that one. In my experience, it is easier to get parents to volunteer to clean toilets than to officiate anything.

Fixed it! :D

This not blowing the whistle or not blowing it loudly is a real "kid thing." Have had the same problem with youth soccer officials for years... some as old as 17. They just won't fill the stupid thing up with air. Drive me crazy.

With some of my partners, I wasn't always sure if it was 3-man or 3-whistle. I did know for sure that it would be at least 1-man (me) on the 3-whistle team.:p