I will soon volunteer at an off-season event as a referee, for the first time. Would love to get any advice for this role, both general advice and also things specific for Charged Up.
Thanks!
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- Read the game and human rules throughly.
- Talk to your HR.
- Watch some archived matches and see what penalties you can identify.
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I was recently a referee at a off-season for the first time and the best thing that helped me was,
- Talk to your head ref as much as you can
- Ask as much questions as you have
- If you make a call that you were confused about, immediately talk to your HR about it to learn about what to do next time you see something like that.
After being a ref at the off-season, I really enjoyed reffing and I may start to ref more often at official events
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Pay attention to your job and your area. It is easy to start watching a good robot and miss something in your area.
Lean on your head ref when in doubt.
Also make sure if it is your job to score the charge station correctly. A miss in that can be huge for the scoring and ranking points.
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Don’t be like this guy 
It’s okay to not call penalties sometimes.
(Just giving Erich a hard time, we grew up in frc together and he never misses a call on us!)
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Unpopular opinion with some, but the most fair thing you can do as a referee is to be absolutely consistent in your calls and do the best you can do to call blatant and egregious violations of the rules.
Key words being blatant and egregious. Lots of people will say “good refs make few calls”, but I can guarantee each and every one of them have experienced an opponent not getting fouled for a rule violation and then getting up in arms about why their opponent didn’t get fouled. There is such thing as being too trigger happy with minor violations, but it’s important (and difficult) to learn what should be called and what shouldn’t be called.
Above all else, though, be consistent. Nobody likes a ref who sometimes makes a call for something and sometimes doesn’t.
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- Pay attention! Don’t let your focus go toward areas so that you’d miss the action in front of you. Try not to watch robots doing amazing stuff so that you miss something that should be called.
- Learn the rules, but most importantly, try to remember which infractions are fouls and which are tech fouls. Anything that you think might need a yellow or red card, inform the head ref.
- Don’t be the “gotcha” ref - call things that need to be called, but don’t focus on nit-picky stuff just so you can make a call.
- Have fun. After all, you have “the best seat in the house”.
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Lots of good stuff hear. Obviously the best piece of preparation is to thoroughly read the game manual. After that, watch matches and put yourself in the position of a referee, think about where your focus should be and what decisions you’ll be making.
Day of, the most important things are to get your scores correct, and to be confident on the big rules (this year, that’s rule G204 through G207). Beyond that, just remember what physically happened in your quadrant and you can work with the head ref to figure things out after the match.
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Don’t be a statue. Your job is to see things in your quadrant of the field, even things the drive teams and perhaps head ref might not be able to see. A brief touch of contact in a protected zone for instance. Or what looks like a touch but was a near miss. You will have a general area to cover, keep moving within it to get the best line of sight.
Be demonstrative. Don’t call penalties for the heck of it but if you see one and are sure of it, your gestures should be unambiguous.
The head ref will discuss with the crew such harder issues such as what happens when there is a tip over. Those at least are usually events that HR will see as well. You’d be surprised how much can be conveyed with eye contact across the field.
Perfection can’t be attained and should not be expected. Hard work and full engagement is your mantra.
T
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Anticipate but don’t pre-judge. That is, watch the game action and anticipate where fouls may happen, and then focus on that and move to get a better view if necessary. But then make sure you actually saw the foul before calling it.
In Charged Up, watch the robots crossing the mid-field area, anticipating where a red and blue robot may be coming together. Pay close attention to which robot is initiating contact. That can change very quickly.
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Big plus one here. In a perfect world you call it correctly in the moment and that’s the standard we should strive for, but at a minimum be able to articulate exactly what happened (what robot did what action in which zone, just arm in zone or part of bumper in zone, contacted which other robot where, inside frame or outside) so you can get the call correct after the match with your head ref.
Also dont lie to your head ref. If they ask you “were the bumpers in the zone or just the arm” if you dont remember dont make something up.
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Some of this may just be different phrasing for similar ideas others have already said, but:
- It’s a very different way of watching a match: You’re looking for problems, and anything manually scored by the ref, and not actually looking for cases where robots are doing cool things and scoring well. Definitely takes some getting used to. (It can be particularly hard in games like Rapid React, where your instinct is to follow the ball from the robot into the goal, but from a referee perspective it really didn’t matter whether the ball went in or not.)
- For things that you’re manually scoring (for Charged Up, the Auto Mobility and Docking/Parking), getting the score right is much more important than watching for fouls or fiddling with trying to enter it into the ref panel. Like if you’re scoring Mobility in auto, your eyes should be on the field until all three robots have received the points, or Auto is over, and only then should you take your eyes off the field to enter them into the tablet.
- Your focus is just on your quarter of the field. It’s amazingly easy for your eyes to follow a robot as it moves out of your area (especially if it’s one you’re affiliated with or is famous in some way, but even just in general for all robots) and then miss another robot entering your area from the other side. You need to do something akin to regularly checking your rear view mirror while driving, of keeping on turning your head side to side to ensure that you know what’s happening in your corner.
- Have confidence in yourself. Action happens really quickly. You need to decide whether a foul occurred or not, and if you’re sure that it did then you call it. But you can’t hem and haw over and over about was it or wasn’t it a foul, and spend half the match thinking about it. You won’t generally get more information later in the match about the incident. Just make the best call you can, in the moment. And err on the side of not making a call if you’re not sure you saw the issue. I mean, in basketball or football or whatever, you never see a ref say “You know what, I realized that three plays ago that was definitely a foul after all.” Call it when you see it. Or don’t call it.
- And if you are making a call, you need to show that you have that confidence in yourself. If you just make a little halfhearted wave, it can look like you don’t know what you’re doing, even though it’s the right call. Make it obvious and clear that yes, you are making a call. (Or that no, you’re not.) Perception of confidence and showing it through your body language can sometimes be more important than actual confidence.
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I love a lot of the advice here. Something I’ve said over the years, it takes knowing ~5 rules to be a good ref. There are a LOT of rules and if you’re new, trying to learn all of them is going to be overwhelming. It’ll likely result in you spending too much time thinking during matches. The more you’re thinking, the more you’re going to delay your response. Once you flag a robot, that isn’t the end. You can ask for a chat after the match and explain what you’ve seen to the head ref. They’re more than happy to reverse the call and remove the foul. As you do more and more events, you’ll start to learn the evergreen (in writing) and evergreen (in similar intent year over year) rules and move beyond the “good” measure.
For this year’s game, the rules I’d focus on as a first-time ref:
- Controlling multiple game pieces (explicitly where it is, and isn’t, allowed)
- Protected zones (and what exactly makes it a violation. Some are any part. Some require bumpers. All require a specific robot to be within the zone)
- Initiating contact inside a robot (know the conditions, know them well)
- Damaging the field (popping cubes) - Ask your HR for guidance on this call to be consistent across the field
You’ll have a quadrant. Understand your first priority is to watch that quadrant. If someone can ask you what happened in a match afterwards and you know the answer, you’re probably doing things wrong. If it was outside of your quadrant, your focus was in the wrong place. You’ll know 1/4 of the field REALLY well but you’ll miss a lot. It’s strange to be so close to the field and charged with watching the match and not knowing what goes on in most of it. But, that’s the role when done well.
Unpopular opinion: call everything to the letter of the rule. There’s two general complaints about refereeing. One is “nitpicky” (or other such words) and the other is “inconsistency.” The further you get from nitpicky, the more inconsistent you become. There are so many tiny variations that you’ll have to start keeping track of (and then teams will have to keep track of the differences between each ref) that arbitrarily applying grace will lead to inconsistency. It’s far more frustrating to not know what to expect. It’s even worse when you have two calls in very similar situations go against you in both directions. The more consistent you are in applying the rules, the more fair you are in general. It’s something that’s not obvious, but every time you make a decision to wave a flag or not, you’re penalizing one alliance. If it met the rules and you didn’t wave it, it feels good to not penalize an alliance for something “small.” But, you’ve also taken away the points from the other alliance who didn’t commit any infraction, small or otherwise. Someone is being penalized for your decision.
Think about your zone before each match. You’re scoring auton? Focus on robots crossing the line and trust your counterpart to watch for other things. It’s terrible to miss auton points because you’re watching that fancy robot getting close to the center line. You’re scoring the charge station? Be in an angle to watch the lights flash and let you know to score. Get this right. Getting it wrong will change the outcome of matches and you won’t be able to fix it. You’ll just watch the video later and feel terrible about it.
Remember the ultimate goal here is to help the teams have fun. You’re in a role that’s the enemy by nature. But, that doesn’t mean you have to act like it. Talk to teams. If you see a team struggling with something, let your head ref know so they can be told and it won’t happen going forward. When drive teams ask you things, be friendly in responding (even if the response is asking them to go to the question box). If you see them doing something in practice that will cost them during matches, tell them. It’s possible to enhance a team’s experience while being in a tougher role. Focus on those bits as best you can.
And as a reminder, always throw down the thumb after a match and go ask the head ref for a sanity check when you’re not sure about a call. You’ll learn. Together, you’ll get it as best you can.
You’re going to get some calls wrong. It’ll suck. Give yourself grace as well. Learn from it. Avoid making the same mistakes twice.
And I’ll leave this with one final thought: if you’re not sure you saw something, you didn’t.
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Definitely this, I wish I remembered to add it in my list as well. It’s very easy for referees to be seen as “the bad guys”, whose job consists of just telling people that they screwed up. You have to make a real, concerted effort to be friendly, mentoring, and helpful, to ensure that they know that your job there is really to help everyone have fun. You are there to help people have fun by ensuring that the event is called consistently, fairly, and without undue delay, sure, but keep in mind the ultimate goal of inspiring people that engineering is fun. Those of us who are more toward the introverted side of the spectrum (or otherwise have a hard time initiating conversation with a stranger, which is really most people I think) need to really make an effort to talk to teams before and after matches. Ask them how their day is going, what that cool part on their robot or drive station does, and help them feel comfortable that they can be at ease because you’re there to help them. Hard to do, but a very key part of the job.
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- Pay attention! Don’t let your focus go toward areas so that you’d miss the action in front of you. Try not to watch robots doing amazing stuff so that you miss something that should be called.
Cant emphasize this enough, its difficult especially as a former competitor not to get sucked into the action of watching robots do cool things. that being said, stay focused on your zone and watch closely what happens.
Be consistent, having done just about everything job you could do as a ref over the years ive made mistakes, but they were consistent over the course of the respective tournament. Even if something was misinterpreted at least it was done so equally for everyone.
Lastly, defer to your head ref. they are the one that makes the final decision and all questions can be directed to them. you might get asked by the HR to clarify why you listed a penalty, so just be ready for that if it happens
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Thank you all for the great advice. The referees at the off-season event I volunteered at were mostly (if not all) first-timers, and we had some difficulty determining if actions were consequential/intentional/G201 violations. A few examples:
- A robot died at the entrance to the opponent alliance’s Community, and an opponent robot touched it, but it seemed that it didn’t have to do that in order to continue moving. Is that a G201 or rather a G207 because it says “regardless of who initiates contact”? The distinction between the examples given in the blue box of G201 is not the most clear to me.
- A robot controlled a Cube and plowed another one about halfway across the field (didn’t seem to alter the direction of driving), then it flew sideways. The robot continued driving into the community, scored the Cube it held, then came back and scored the other Cube which it plowed before, which was now closer to the community. Is that a G403 violation?
There needs to be a HUGE disclaimer here. We weren’t at the event and won’t know things exactly. There are different interpretations. Whatever your head ref went with is likely to be most consistent with other things called at that event.
As you’re asking for thoughts, I can share those but they’re only my own and others may disagree. (the fun disclaimers for referee questions)
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It sounds like a G207. A dead robot is still a robot and can both score and take penalties. “it didn’t have to” isn’t the same as “it intentionally hit the dead robot.” If a robot dies in the desired path, it forces the other robot to drive around it to avoid contact. A robot just playing the game and trying to cycle pieces is likely to hit the robot but also isn’t expected to alter this path as that would create some form of benefit to sitting there. Generally, you’ll give them the benefit of the doubt to “they’re playing the game.” If you see them stop and start to bump a few times, it becomes a bit more clear they’re intending to draw the foul. As G201 requires intent, you need something to cross a mental bar of “they’re doing it on purpose.”
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The blue box pretty comprehensively handles this. It’s rare you’ll call a plow control. They were driving to access an area of the field (their grid). Moving a game piece to do so is explicitly called out in the blue box as not control. If they’re slowing down to push multiple pieces here and have a greater ability to place where the cubes go, you can look at a G403. If they’re driving and something bounces off them, they’d have to be absurdly skilled to get it where they want it.
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