Improving Officiating at FIRST Events

[Madison]

I am certain that the folks at FIRST are concerned about providing a consistent experience to all teams and are making an effort to get that to happen. This season's instructional course for referees represents a good step in that direction; but coupled with the ambiguity of what constitutes a violation of many of the rules, it is ineffective. More needs to be done.

FIRST has had good success in retaining the institutional knowledge of regional directors, field technical advisors and other staff at the 'executive' level of events. Officiating staff should be considered to be of the same importance as these other key volunteers and absolutely must have existing knowledge of a team's experience as they work through a competition season. Their knowledge must be maintained and informed by the experience of operating on a team.

It is absurd to think that the time and effort invested into a competition season by so many teams -- most of whom attend only a single event -- is ultimately at the mercy of someone who's only connection to FIRST and to the game is a conference call, an online training course and two days spent at an event. The competition is a means to an end and no amount of bad officiating is going to take away what kids learn during the season, thankfully, as otherwise these competitions would be a joke.

Generally,

• Officiating staff -- all of them -- must be retained from year to year and have investment in the program beyond two days per year of involvement.
• The officiating staff must be more involved in early development of game rules so as to weed out as much ambiguity as possible. Referees have no place determining intent during a FIRST match and shouldn't be asked to do so.
• They must know the rules. Institutional knowledge will improve understanding of a complex rule book, but there is no excuse for a team of referees that doesn't know the rule book chapter and verse, so to speak. I spend a considerable amount of time ensuring that our robot complies with every rule and I don't think it's too much to expect that the referees would spend as much time learning the rules for their part.
• Teams absolutely must be informed after each match of which rules they violated. I don't care about the schedule. Imagine a football game wherein they never announced what the action was that drew a penalty, nor who was responsible and how the crowd might react to that. Ambiguity is a sure fire way to create discontent with the staff.

I'm not going to pretend that I'm not exceptionally angered by the officiating at the Oregon Regional this weekend, but that we have a student dedicated to watching the referees is absurd. Something ought to be done to eliminate inconsistency in officiating in as many ways as possible and the only way to make that happen is to talk about how discrepancies appear and figure out ways of eliminating them in the future. A training course is a step in the right direction, but we need more.