Let's hear it for the Refs !

[alicen]

Hi, I'm a ref. I reffed at two events on opposite coasts this year in back to back weeks.

Yes, we do a hard job.
Yes, we sometimes get calls wrong.
Yes, I want to hear when I've gotten something wrong, because I would like to be able to explain what I saw vs what you saw.
Yes, the GDC could 'fix' a lot of these problems by giving scoring aspects back to non-ref volunteers.
Yes, most posts I've seen on CD have been "This call happened to us, we think it was wrong, what do you think?".
Here is a quote from something someone else wrote that I didn't feel was constructive or helpful in one of those threads:

This should have been a field fault and had the match replayed.

I was not impressed with the referee quality at CMP this year.

No, I don't think that ref calls shouldn't be talked about on CD.

Here's something else.
As a ref, I defer to how my head ref interprets the rules and calls them. In my experience reffing under different head refs, some things are slightly different, more or less lenient, etc and so on. This isn't usually that big of an issue for regionals/districts, but when you mix all those refs from all over at CMP and then have rules that are ambiguous or can be read different ways after 7 weeks, then some calls will appear bad to some and fine to others.

On another note -- I love wearing the zebra stripes because I can have a bit of fun seeing students nervous as to why I'm in their pit, then exhale relief when I just want a picture of their robot
However, this season I was thanked for being a volunteer (without any prompting) exactly once, and it happened to be a Thursday morning in my 'street clothes'. I'm not saying treat your volunteers like they walk on water, but that one girl saying "Thank you for volunteering!!" as I walked away honestly made my weekend even more enjoyable.