Shadowing

[OverAndBack]

My association (wisely) matches up new officials with experienced ones as mentors. I had the chance tonight to observe my mentor's crew as they worked a high school varsity game between two of the top teams in the state.

This is a very experienced crew that has worked together for a long time. Yet they pregamed as if they didn't take anything for granted, and they were brilliant to watch in action. Everything was boom-boom-boom, here's how we're going to go, unfazed, everything was top notch.

All of the guys were wonderful - answering questions or passing along tips or pointing out why they'd do something.

I watched the head linesman for the first quarter and was amazed at everything he has to handle. Then I watched the back judge for half the second quarter, the umpire for the rest of the second quarter, the referee in the third quarter, and the line judge in the fourth. I made a couple pages of notes of things I wanted to remember mechanic-wise and questions to ask.

It was a great learning experience and I encourage any new guys like me to find someone you can go and observe, even if your association doesn't have a formal mentoring program.

[JRutledge]

This is how a lot of us learned early in our career. The thing is that usually we were dragged to games by older officials. Unfortunately mentoring does not happen as much anymore, so we created a mentor system to help facilitate some hands on training. I am glad you enjoyed the experience. We have a board meeting on Monday. I would like to know what crew you worked with so I could tell the other board members of your comments. We will need as much information as we can get to revise the system for next year.

[email protected]

Peace

[Simbio]

I'm in my 6th year of officiating. My friend that got me into this, is two years ahead of me. As I was waiting to move up to varsity, I would go to his pregames whenever he had a varsity game. It was a great learning experience and really helped get me ready for when I moved up. I'd also volunteer to be the ball boy. It was a good way to get the umpires and referees to get to know my name and face. Some still remember me doing that.

I'm in my fourth season officiating varsity ball, and if there's ever a game on a night that I don't have one, I'll still try to make the pregame. Its always a good learning experience because it allows you to watch the officials and even add to stuff that you're already doing. I don't know that you can ever get to the point where you have nothing left to improve on. If you do get to that point, then its time to walk away from the game and see if you can get that good at golf......