Quote:
Originally Posted by Anne Shade
2. Provide for a method of evaluating the referees, specifically the head referees. Training is only half of the equation. Training provides the knowledge but is it being applied correctly? Referees in all professional sports are evaluated by their organization after all games. If too many mistakes are made, they are re-trained or released. Where is the evaluation for FIRST referees? How do we know that the training received was effective if their is no evaluation of performance? Some people are just not cut out for the job but we have no way to determine that until something goes grossly wrong.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Brandon Holley
My suggestions:
1. There absolutely must be a way to train these referees better than just a test. Corey balint had suggested a video of possible scenarios played out via animation or even people robots like done in the kickoff examples, and do this pre regional events.
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Perhaps we can take care of both of issues with one stone, maybe 3 issues with one stone. Ever thought about focus groups of FIRST Referees?
The difficulties of using video footages to train refs is an excellent idea, but I don't think animation is going to cut it. We literally need footages from the first week regionals. It's true that there will be no footages until the first week, but that is not that different from how things are now.
The Refs and the GDC go into week 1 without a clear vision of how things will played out, but their vision is refined after that, and refined again after another week, and so on. So, its a matter of how you can capture the first week to help you train the Refs better in the weeks that follow. Besides, there are certain elements that will continue to come back year after year, such as entanglement, tipping, and high speed ramping.
Anyway, back to the focus group. Here is the idea. You look at videos from week one. You look for instances where rule violations occur. And you look for them so much that you begin build up a spectrum of instances between clearly acceptable acts and clear violations. Say you get 5 video clips of ramming that give you an understanding of, on a scale of 1 to 5, what's acceptable ramming and what's unacceptable, and the gray area in between.
Here is how you apply these videos to training and evaluation. During the training, you show 1 clip as an example of clear violation of a certain rule. After the training is over, you show 5 clips of the same rule, and you ask the person in training which ones they feel are violation and which ones aren't. You give them a chance to make mistakes so they have a better understanding of the variation.
Then you show them another 5 clips for another evaluation. After you repeat that once or twice, you should have a good idea whether that person has caught on to what's acceptable and what isn't.
For training purposes, it is very important for the head Referee at the headquarter to decide, on scales of 1 to 5, what is acceptable and what isn't. Once a line is drawn, you drill that line into all referees' head in the weeks that follow. Consistency is what's important here. And you continue to use these clips and newer ones to train and evaluate refs before and after the events, and before and after the years.
Won't be for every rule of course, just the difficult ones.
Here are some side bonuses:
1. You release some of these clips to the teams so they too will get a better understanding of what's acceptable and what isn't.
2. You collect data as people evaluate various clips. The more data you collect, the better you are at understanding, in general, how people are calling certain rules. This understanding will help you decide whether a rule need to be better written, or if the training need to be improved.
Sounds complicated, right? You betcha! There is probably a simplier idea in here somewhere. On the other hand, there are many people watching many videos of many competition during the weeks. Won't be hard to find volunteers whose job is to identify these clips for the GDC and the head Ref at headquarter. Once a system is in place, Refs and refs in training just need to go to the training site and watch some videos.