FAHA: Referee/Volunteer Screening?

[Ken Leung]

As mentioned by the following FIRST-a-holic, and many responds in the post highlighted in the following message, this thread should not be questioning if the referee at a competition made the wrong call or not. Lets focus in answering this fellow FIRST-a-holic's concern about the referee screening process, and have a civil discussion about some difficulties teams are facing at competition from the volunteers who help running the event.

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My team recently completed a regional in which we had an issue with the on of the referee's.

This Thread (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=26973) contains a similar problem to the one we faced. The opinions that those responding to that post felt I completely agree with, however our problem was a bit different.

One of the referee's at our regional turned out to be a former (& very disgruntled) team member. They left us during the build period becuase they did not cohere well with our team, and chose to leave under thier own will without being asked to leave/forced to leave/pushed to leave.

When we arrived at the regional which we knew this person was volunteering at, we learned that due to a lack of volunteers they had been made a refeferee. This scared us greatly. On friday, in a match that ultimatly decided whether we would end up seeded or unseeded, this referee threw 2 penalties against our team causing us to lose the close match instead of win. None of us believed that we had commited the double infraction, and felt this was specifically becuase that referee was biased against us. (In a later match while in the que we heard the same judge issue multiple warnings to a team in a round who committed the same infractions that we had apparently done) Our team coach objected to the head referee but we were told that the referee's have final say.

My questions to those out there are:
What could/should have been done by us?
Should FIRST set restraints on the possible ages that referees can be (as to hope maturity=impartiality)?

Other suggestions would greatly help.