Quote:
Originally Posted by Liz Smith
Now, on being informed of the rules. What you think may be inconsistancies with calls, may just be you just not knowing the rules of the game well enough. Besides the referee meeting, there was the drivers meeting at the championship, where the referees and the drivers discussed certain rules and how the calls were going to be made at the event. The drivers meeting answered all the questions that the drivers from the teams in all the divisions had. Unless you were at that entire drivers meeting, I don't think you have a fair say in how a play should have been called. I don't know what makes some of you think that you can trash the referees, maybe its because you think that unlike teams, they don't read CD.. but they do, and maybe you should be a little more careful about what you say about the referees.
|
Yes, referees are volunteers. Yes, they are doing their best.
But clearly their best is not good enough. Maybe that isn't their fault. Maybe FIRST is not training them well enough. Maybe a lot of different things are contributing to the problem.
Bashing the referees is not ok. But overall this year has had the all around worst officiating I've seen in my 7 years in FRC. Some of it has been inconsistincies in the rules. Some of it has been flat out not knowing the rules. Some of it has been referees just not paying attention.
I've been a referee. I refereed three events in 05 (by far the hardest year to ref). I understand that everyone is human and makes mistakes. In fact, I was part of the ref crew at SVR that was involved in one of the biggest controversies of the year. I'd like to think I have some basis for understanding the difficulty of the job of the referee.
FIRST should at the very least address the consistency of the head refereeing. There is no way they will ever be able to field ref crews at every regional that are composed of multi year FIRST participants who have a very good idea of what kind of contact is acceptable and what is not. However, they absolutely must have a head ref who is on the same page as all the other head refs, and they must have the proper training to be able to train their other referees.
If this means that FIRST needs to train and pay 10-20 head referees to attend every event during the season, then that is what needs to be done. Teams are paying far too much money to show up at an event and then find out the rules will be called very differently from the way they were written, because the referees are interpreting them differently.
And as much as the referees do give up their time to come
volunteer let's face it--some of them should not be refereeing. Some have never even seen the rulebook until they show up at the event. Some still don't know the rulebook completely even after the event. Perhaps there should be some sort of rules quiz given to the referees at each event to ensure that they at the very least understand all the basic rules like: when you can touch the controls after auton, when you receive penalties for home zone violations, etc.