Thread: Team Update 17
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Unread 14-03-2007, 08:01
Jack Jones Jack Jones is offline
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Re: Team Update 17

Kevin,

I can understand and feel your pain. 1213 is cash poor too. Last year the Martians fronted us $4k to make the payment deadline and Gail Alpert (469) scrounged up enough to get us entry into a second regional. This year the state grant saved us and maybe shamed the Birmingham district into enough for Buckeye. Each year I go thousands of dollars out-of-pocket, not so much from benevolence, but from pride. I’m not about to have our team work that hard only to go onto that field and stink up the place.

But all of that is really beside the point. The fact that our fundraising sucks does not give us license to berate those we perceive to exacerbate our predicament. Especially when that person is not at the root of the problem.

Consider the job handed to the head referee. He has to decipher volumes of rules that are far from perfect. Then has to on-the-spot train a crew selected by a volunteer coordinator a whos only criterion was that they signed up on VMS and were screened. Then he has to spoon feed the rules to the teams, many of whom, as we all know by the questions here and the Q&A, didn’t bother to read them. Finally, he gets to make decisions that are sure to please only half of the people. He gets to be the focal point in what could be described as mother of all things waiting to go wrong.

So what does he get for doing his best with a very flawed process? He gets bad mouthed by ones he is serving, and stabbed in the back by the architects of that malfunction.

I’ve served with refs from Atlanta to Vegas and most points in between. I’ve seen people who had no business being on the floor – no concept of the game – no grasp of the rules – no officiating experience – or an obvious conflict of interest. I’ve seen good referring criticized on this forum by people who had no idea what they were talking about. Worse yet, I’ve seen very weak refs have the gall to come here and criticize others. What I have not seen was FIRST take exception as they would when the vitriol was directed at them.

We sat there at the Champs in ’05 and ’06 and listened as some of the rules got officially mangled. The ruling at GLR came nowhere near that kind of incongruity; it came nowhere near having as much of an impact on my psyche.

If we think that just anyone can step in and officiate, then that’s what we’ll get – just anyone. Meanwhile, the ones with real experience and talent and intelligence and jurisprudence will have gotten sick to their stomachs. They are rare; we are railroading have railroaded one of them!
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