Improving Officiating at FIRST Events

[DCA Fan]

I haven't been following this thread, but I wanted to offer forth some thoughts as a FIRST referee.

Firstly, we of course must understand that no one is perfect, and we are bound to make a slip up or five. However, we do have a system of appealing calls, and that has, in my experience, ironed out most problem calls.

Second, I don't know if this is a practice at all the regionals, but in San Diego, we announced what penalties went to what alliance prior to announcing the scores to each match. This has helped many teams, from what I could see.

Third, understand that finding people to commit their weekends and part of their weekdays is rather difficult, at least for us here in Southern California. At both San Diego and Los Angeles, the volunteer coordinator was having trouble rounding up enough people who had the time to commit to being present Thurs, Fri, Saturday, make a conference call, and take online training. Yes, it is a great thing that we ask referees to go through all of this training, but understand that as these people are also volunteers, it would be difficult to ask these people to spend their hard-earned vacation time to travel up to Manchester, or anything considerably more time consuming than what we have now. What we have found is that the best practice is to have practice referee-ing the Thursday matches, and have a post meeting with the head referee discussing calls.

I hope that these thoughts are useful in your discussion.