Appreciate your Assignors
 

I say appreciate your assignors because I am amazed at how busy I am with doing assigning.

This is my 1st year doing it. I assign just JV & some Middle School. We have a Varsity assignor & another Middle School assignor.

I have had nearly 1,000 emails since the beginning of the season ( Dec. 1st ) I have had too many call offs, declines and turn backs to count. In addition I get call offs 3 hrs before game time and have to find officials for a game 40 miles away.

I am not complaining. I signed uop to do this and I love it, but think about what you are putting your assignor through when you call off with short notice. Sometimes it can not be helped. But if you know you can not work a game 2 weeks from now, be kind, tell him today.

I had to turn back a game once this season, as I couldn't get out of working one night, and I didn't know that ahead of time. Thankfully I was able to tell the assignor of that game three weeks ahead of time.

I hated doing it. Especially since I couldn't give him the name of somebody that could do the game for me (we can't just give the game away... the assignor must re-assign the game himself).

Remedies ???
 

Do you use Arbiter, or some other assignment software?

Are there penalties in place for not accepting a game if you don't close out the date in advance?

Are there penalties in place for turnbacks (games already accepted) unless for injury, illness, work related, or family emergency?

Assignors? We dont have no stinkin' assignors!

Our games down here come from individual AD's for the most part, few schools here in my range belong to conferences that have assignors. Not that the AD's here arent pulling their collective hair out at times. We used to have a lot of problems with game jumpers, thats getting better do to the myOHSAA system but somehow people still manage to double book themselves.

Absolutely!
 

We're having another one of "those" seasons where weather and postponements are playing havoc with the schedule. Our Assignor is probably not having a lot of fun. My game tonight was now postponed for the third time. Tough job.

As we have a good many college officials in our HS ranks, being available for re-scheduled games can pay off. I keep my Arbiter schedule up to date and myself available as much as I can - even on the weekends.

I definitely hear you. At our last association meetings, the local assignors are invited to attend and share relevant information (our association doesn't assign games). One of my assignors mentioned that between illness and some season-ending injuries to officials, he had a number of games to reassign. So, I try to make myself available as much as possible without overworking myself in a given week.

Among other duties, I was the assignor for our local kids rec league for about 15 years. The big advantage to this was scheduling for myself the games that were the most convenient and also being able to decide who my partner would be for each game.

I also spent time going to other games in our league to do evals.

At least you're not doing baseball or softball and dealing with rainouts too. :eek:

Our problem is numbers, we have about 50 officials and 7 newbies. We try to keep newbies on MS only, but because of our numbers, they end up with maybe 5 JV & Freshmen games each for the year. Of our 50 officials, 3 do college. 3 or 4 are older and will limit their days. 6 or 7 are college students and are limited. Most members work about 60 dates. Some as many as 83.

It is challenging but fun. It';s much easier if I have 2 or 3 days notice to fill a spot. This past week I have had about 10 turn backs with less than 24 hrs notice.

I train and assign our Church league too. So far I have only worked 1 day of church games. Hoping to keep it that way if I can get officials.

Appreciating the hands that feed you is the least you can do.

We have one assignor that handles 110 or so officials, for middle school, JV, and high school. I always wondered if that number of officials in the norm for one assignor.

Here is what my group has set up.

A $32,000.00 Thank You ...
 

The members of my local IAABO board appreciate our assignment commissioner with a salary of $30,000.00. There are 325 members who pay a set amount each year in dues ($125.00), and a percentage fee (7%) of the money we earn from our game assignments. Our assignment commissioner assigns about 70 high schools (freshman, junior varsity, varsity, girls, boys) and a large number of public middle schools. We also have an assistant commissioner who earns $2,000.00 and assigns high school scrimmages, and Special Olympics Unified Games.

Regarding our Catholic middle school league, our assigner charges the 16 schools $125.00 each ($2,000.00 total) to assign boys, and girls, "varsity", and "junior varsity" games. Each team plays a ten, to twelve, game schedule. We have about 40 officials in our group. No dues, no assignment percentage fees.

It's not an easy job.

I became an assigner in July. 21 schools, I hire officials for 9 varsity sports. I had never been to a track meet or a wrestling match or a high school volleyball match before July.

One way to show appreciation rarely mentioned - make sure all your decisions are supportable by your assigner and assume everything is on video cause it is. I had a coach ejected last week from a game. After the ejection, I sat down and watched the video with the athletic director of the schoo with no preview. In such an instance, I want to be able to point at the conduct of the coach and describe the proper steps taken by the crew before, during, and after the ejection.

Of course we get paid for this. Why wouldn't we?