He might be on a golf course, though. The Arbiter works pretty well except for via the phone.

No assignor in my little slice of SE Ohio. Being a newish (3rd year) official, I'm still working my way up the ladder as far as getting games go, so I take what I can get. Fees, I take what is offered. It's not really about the money anyway.

By the way, great forum. It's a daily read for me.

I live on the border between rural outstate MO and the exburbs of the St Louis metro area. When I first started and was working small school JH Frosh and varsity games from the small schools to the north you had to hawk your own games with the AD's which especially when trying to build a varsity schedule was a pure nightmare. The most common problem was AD 1 would call and offer you say 4 dates. OK you take them. Then AD 2 calls and offers you 4 dates. Well it always seemed half of them were the same dates. It would only get worse from there. My schedule would always have holes in them and be inconsistent. Then I joined the association to the south that the local big school conference assignor works from. SO much better. I don't have to go hawking my own games. When going to a site all I have to worry about is referring the game, not whether so and so wants me back. To get better games, you just have to improve your game. To those that say you have no control, well you still do at least as far as dates are concerned, you just block them out. Location, yea you're kinda at the mercy of the assignor, but to me that doesn't really matter when everything is between 20-50 minutes anyway. For two years I would still take a few games from up north but it got to the point that wasn't even worth the hassle. I've never looked back. If you have a choice, to me, there really isn't one. The best thing about my situation is my HS assignor and my college assignor work really well together (technically he is still a part of our association). So as I advance and get more and more colleges dates I don't have to worry about my HS assignor holding a leash on my career goals.

Theres a couple of assignors in SE Ohio for some of the leagues like the SOC and SEOAL. Though the SEOAL assignor only does varsity league games. If you don't have a crew your SOL for varsity games.

That's the thing, I'm right in the middle of TVC country where the AD's do all the assigning themselves. It's ok though, I'm still learing as I go and hopefully will work my way up the ladder eventually.