Politics of Basketball

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Because many here may not know...in Texas there are chapters that cover a specific geographic area and each chapter has someone assign games for schools in their area to members of the chapter.

In my chapter there was a similar mini-revolt over assignments. The assignor commented that he could only go by the feedback he received and personal observations because there was no established evaluation program. The chapter spent the rest of that season putting together an evaluation committee of "top officials", establishing criteria and developing grade categories identifying the type of game you would be eligible to work given your grade (from large school varsity down to middle school for both boys and girls). The next year every official in the chapter was observed and evaluated three times (and twice in each year afterwards).

The next season, even with the grades and criteria, the same officials were getting all the "big games" and large programs even though the committee had identified officials who should be getting better games (and many of them were still being given medium sized school girls varsity). At the end of that year, the Executive Committe fired the assignor and hired a new one. Funny, after that happened the "rising stars" and the officials who were making solid improvement in the craft started getting "better schedules".

So you see, sometimes it really is the good ole boy network that officials are fighting.