"I'm 52 years old, and in all my years..."

[Jurassic Referee]

Originally Posted by hoopguy

My perspective is as both a ref and a fan watching my daughter play AAU. There is a huge discrepancy in work ethic I see out there. The issue partly stems from the assignor. At one of the venues I work AAU, the assignor sent out a pre-AAU season email explaining exactly what he expected from his refs. Two man games.... He expects his refs to switch on all shooting fouls. He expects his refs to run from endline to hash mark at a minimum. Most reporting is done from where the foul occurred unless it is a shooting foul and switching is occurring.

My perspective is as an assignor who has to find people to cover hundreds of these games on a weekend......

If I told my people that they had to treat each game like a good HS varsity contest while doing multiple games a day, I couldn't find enough people to cover a fraction of the games. You get what you pay for. And if you want to pay typical low rec rates, you're gonna bodies. It just ain't worth it for a lot of officials, especially when you factor in the abuse that you know the officials are going to get.

The people who put on these tournaments do so to make as much money as they can. Typically, they could care less about the quality of the officiating they receive. They just want coverage. And the know-nothing fans and coaches don't have a clue either whether they're getting a good or bad whistle. If every single call doesn't go their way, the officiating is terrible anyway in their minds.

The main reason that any official does these off-season games is M-O-N-E-Y! And that fits right in with the reason these games are being played in the first place. If you want professional officiating, then put on a professional show and pay the appropriate rates. If you want to run a typical AAU off-season run-and-gun tournament, then don't whine about the officiating that you gonna get. It matches the play.

It's nice to have lofty officiating ideals, but there's real life involved too.

JMO.