This would explain why the booklet posted by @Pittsburgh Ref doesn't mention "flapping", since I clearly remember it. For the younger referees out there, when I was a player, fouls that would be direct free kicks in the modern era were whistled as "dangerous play" back then, even in the penalty area.
explain to me how that’s double dipping? The schools via the conference hire me to input and keep track of their games and times, and schedule the refs and the referees pay me a 3 % fee. The amount of work I do is substantial. and, again unless you have done it, you have no idea how time consuming and genuinely difficult the job is. TBH, the refs should be paying double.
I think the bottom line is that assigning is too big (and annoying) a job for someone to do as a volunteer. I know that our high school assignor is working 12 plus hours a day during the season, every day, to assign about 2,400 games. And she has to pay to use the website. The schools are paying for the expense of having officials there for their games. Some of that money goes to the assignor for their work in making that happen. It can either go from the schools to the assignor and then the rest to the officials for their work or it can all go to the officials and then some of it goes from the officials to the assignor. The pay rates may be gross or net of the assignor cost, but there's always an assignor cost, just like there is a cost of having us at the games.
Hmm. I wonder who was was doing your games. There is very little that would be a DFK that was properly dangerous play in the old days. (A rare non-contact careless tackle/challenge, I suppose.) And DP was never called with much frequency.
This is out of actual question and not sarcasm, but what about assigning makes it a full time job? Like you spend 6-8 hours a day plugging officials into games and waiting for them to accept/decline? Or is it not literally your full time job, but you just do it your free time and the amount of works makes it feel full time?
It is full time when you have enough games. I don't think your estimate of 6 to 8 hours a day is realistic, at least not in our high school situation of over 2,000 games. First, you have to deal with the schools. For our association, that's 70 schools, with 70 different Athletic Directors and I don't know how many athletic department secretaries. JV2 games are not even scheduled until after school starts, because they don't know how many kids they'll have come out. And then you always have schools changing their schedules, including kick off times, locations, adding new games, cancelling games, etc. E.g. last week, I was initially scheduled to do a JV then varsity combination. But the day before the game, the school moved the JV game later in the day, due to heat, so the JV game would overlap the varsity game. That meant that the scheduler had to find a new set of officials for the JV game and let those of us on the initial assignment that we were only doing the varsity game. Then you have referees who have to work late, so they can't do the game this afternoon. Or they are injured and have to be replaced, while the assignor and referee have to work out how long they will be out so the coming games can be reassigned. We also have a large percentage of our high school referees do not speak English as their first language. That necessitates a second assignor who speaks Spanish, with resulting needs for communication between the two assignors. And, to do a good job, you can't just enter names in slots. At this point in the season, we have a bunch of newbies, either new to refereeing soccer or new to high school. They will be very needy because they don't know where to find this or that school, where the field is, how early they are expected to arrive, etc. And the assignor doesn't yet know if this new person knows whether the ball is pumped or stuffed. So an experienced referee may be assigned with them as an AR with the instruction to provide the newbie with feedback, which the assignor then needs to read to see what level the newbie can actually handle, later in the season when the ball really hits the turf. And then you have red cards. The assignor has to inform the state office and the AD of the player/coach of all red cards given, the referee's reasons for the card and their description of the situation. If the AD wishes to appeal the fine and suspension, they have to do so within 24 hours. The assignor is the first level of the appeal process. If the assignor and AD agree that the red card was improperly given, then the appeal is granted. If the assignor says no, the school can then appeal to the state's executive director, but that only happens about once or twice a year. (And our Executive Director played high school soccer himself.) A game with multiple reds can consume the assignor's entire day, not to mention two or three hours the evening when the card(s) were given. Meanwhile the assignor has referees calling to report that the JV game at one site was started late so they will be late to get to their varsity game, etc., etc. Then you have to pay the referees, after fixing all of the adjustments to their schedules and choose a dozen referees out of over 150 that I can then assign to the state championships.
Ever coach a school team, especially a school team that is part-time soccer players? Just getting a team on the bus is sometimes an accomplishment. These kids have been in school all day, almost always someone is missing some sort of equipment. Teenage (boys) are f##king idiots. Not disagreeing with you. The rules basically state that teams are required to be there and you are within your right to do so. And yes, its annoying if you show and you haven't been told. But, I've already left work, so if as long as I don't have another game right after, I usually wait. Longest I've ever waited was 30 minutes. So many wrong things here. Yes, this stuff does just arise at 3:00. Buses start rolling usually around 2:00PM, their drivers (which almost every district is short), first needs to get home all their students and then they begin the sporting event travel. Its not uncommon for the last run of school students to suddenly be running late, alas the sports teams will be late. Not sure where we get this 'almost every AD has a secretary' comes from. Yes, our larger schools do have that, but many of our smaller schools, its a one man/woman job. Calls often happen, but its usually after I've left my job, and I find out when I get to the field.
I could have worded the last paragraph better by expanding on it. The popular call back then was Impeding (with or without contact), which we all knew as "Obstruction" back then. Seemed like an out for the referee to give an indirect free kick in the penalty area instead of a PK or an indirect just outside of the penalty area instead of a 20 yard direct free kick.
In our area high school assigning has gotten harder every year. We keep adding schools and losing refs. If we are lucky we add enough new refs to maintain a consistent level. Several years ago we reached the breaking point, more games than refs. It’s a lot of fun to tell coaches we can’t cover their game. That’s when the AD calls and asks why we are picking on their school. The good news is that some schools are willing to work with us. Unfortunately there’s a lot more bad news. We send refs to games they should never work and we ask refs to work four or five nights a week, generally an hour or more away from their homes. The saving grace for me is that I retired from reffing after Covid shut down our 2020 season. My main advice to my successor has been that he needs to line up his replacement. At some point the money loses its power to overcome the headaches.
I hear you and others, both on the boards and in-person, that HS is a different animal. Having said that, it was disheartening to hear from two high school coaches over the weekend who I respect, that their process for informing the opposing teams of extreme tardiness is: 1) Calling their AD. 2) Their AD is supposed to call the opposing AD. 3) The opposing AD notifies his coach. This is unrealistic and insane. Nowhere in the process is the referee even considered. We're in the year 2024, with text message capability, emails, etc and we're going old school (pun intended) for notifications and no phone call is made directly to the head coach. In the county I live in, approximately 90% of Athletic Directors have their own secretaries. My town has had one for at least 40 years that I'm aware of. Again, I understand the differences and dynamics of youth soccer and HS since folks are coming from school instead of home on a weekend. I get it. However, many things could be done differently to make it a more pleasant environment for all involved. There are too many excuses being made to keep things as they are where the referees time is not even considered in the equation.
I realize the 4:00 p.m. and 4:15 p.m. start eliminates at least 80% of the USSF population. However, you have younger folks who work remotely in the past few years and the numbers are still declining. We had a $300 rebate for new refs last year and we still lost 5. If you had the ability, what do you think could be differently? Anything?
Sounds like a local thing or a “last week’s ref” thing. Obstruction was taught as becoming some sort of penal foul (what DFK fouls were then called) if there was contact. Anyone giving an obstruction IFK for a contact foul was making stuff up back then. And in my experience obstruction calls were extremely rare.
One of the largest club programs in our part of the state makes it "mandatory" to email opposing coaches with your contact information at least several days prior. In the "old days", if a field was double-booked and a game had to be moved, they would have a parent meet the referee crew to notify them because they had no referee contact info. My point? Even taking into consideration the difference in dynamics of HS soccer and club leagues, most try to do well with the referees and modernize. With HS soccer, there is an attitude of "We can't do this because XYZ..." and then wondering why numbers are low and why they can't attract folks who work remotely.
I coached high school softball for a number of years. Just as an example of a bus issue: We were scheduled to play a team an hour and a half away in the country, with a 4:30 first pitch. The school day ended at 2:00. Due to state rules, we had access to the field for batting practice at 3:30. The home school also had no lights, so 4:30 was already kind of pushing it. That math is tight to begin with, particularly when you consider that our equipment was located at our field and not at the school (city school, our kids had to take public transportation or drive to our field, a complete other issue). We had our girls dismissed at 1:30, so we could stop at the field to get the equipment, then hopefully be on the road before 2:00. We dutifully got on the bus, drove across the city to our field, loaded up our equipment, and got back on the bus. 1:50. Plenty of time. And then the bus returned to the school. We asked the bus driver what she was doing and she said "we have to pick up baseball." Baseball had a game, also in the country, roughly half way to our game. Which was scheduled to start at 5:30 and be played under the lights. Baseball was also, of course, completely unprepared to leave for their game 3 hours and 30 minutes early, and were expecting to be picked up at 3:15. But, the bus company was short on busses and decided to combine trips. They just didn't tell anyone about it. I called the Athletic Director, who was in an IEP meeting trying to figure out if a lacrosse player was getting suspended. His secretary was trying to get ahold of someone at the bus company (private contractor). The bus company was dealing with all of the normal "we don't have enough busses for even our normal routes, let alone extracurriculars" issues. I've never met the visiting coach, never had any contact with the visiting coach, this is a non-league game that was randomly scheduled by the state and I have no call list or anything. We are stuck on a bus, trying to implore the baseball coach to show a little hustle (not that it was his fault at all). The AD finally got out of the IEP meeting and called the office of the home school, who had all left for the day. I think he finally got their AD (again, this is non-league and not a school we played often in any sport) through our field hockey coach, who had come from a school in their conference, and had the phone number of their former coach, who had the AD's number. By the time that call happened, it was almost 4:00 and we were getting off the highway to drop off baseball at their game, and we were still over an hour out. They decided to postpone our game. Of course, we had to sit and watch baseball's entire game because the bus driver was not scheduled to return until that game ended. We drove back to the city, dropped our equipment back at our field, and got back to the school at almost 9:00. And never did anything but sit on the bus and then watch our baseball team get shellacked. Shit just happens in high school.
A. Welcome to government structure and procedures B. The coaches and sometimes the AD, are often teachers and may or may not have the time to do it until late. Hell, my wife is a teacher. I'll text her in the morning and not receive a response until after 3:00PM C. There are several schools, where given lead time, do reach out to the referees. They have access to Arbiter to contact us, and we, as referees are required by our association to reach out to the athletic department to confirm stuff in advance.
And its not only schools that have broken communications, here is a little story about club soccer from last spring in which all the pregame communications you want were followed. State Cup match, team from NYC is drawn to play in suburban Albany NY, about 2.5 hours away. Refs get to the field, home team is there warming up. No sign of visiting team. 15 minutes before kickoff, home team reaches out to visitors, they've hit traffic and are running 30 minutes behind and they'll be there in 30. Refs and home team agree to wait it out (no obligation under Cup rules). 30 minutes pass, no team. Call to other team, they can't find the field. Their problem, they went to a similarly named town in Pennsylvania, not NY. Its not just schools that mess this up. Club teams are not finely tuned machines.
Like @Barciur we don't kick up anything to our assignors here. Our chapter dues are $55. The chapter votes each year to give the assignor (and our Rules Interpreter) a stipend, I think something like $900. Mainly, though, there are contracts between the assignor and the schools.
Both last Tuesday and today, I had games in another high school sport cancelled but at least they were the morning of, like before 6 am. It’s only HS soccer where I’ve seen games get cancelled really late
Man, that sounds like a very complicated set of logistics. Now I’m wondering, how did people get by before the internet, before computerized assigning programs, etc. especially when you had late reschedules and things? Seems like a nightmare even more so than the job seems today.
Lots of phone calls, assuming people actually had a cell phone, game reports faxed in, assuming you had access to a fax machine, and stuff in the mail. My first year doing high school, we had a meeting before the first week of the season to get our schedules, printed out on a tractor pin printer. Disaster! The assignor's hard drive crashed that day. We lined up and the assignor told you where to go for games that week and you wrote them down on a piece of paper. It didn't matter who you were, you got whatever games needed to be covered. That's how I was R1 for the first game with a dual that I had ever seen, between two boys' teams that were both ranked in the top 10 in the state. My partner had something like 16 years experience and he was upset that he wasn't R1. Hey, I'm just doing the assignments that Tony gave me. The score was 3-0, with all goals scored in the last 10 minutes. I survived.
I remember a story told by a guy back when I actually lived in Dayton. He gave a red card, then hopped on a flight with his family to Florida. The next morning he was trying to use the hotel fax machine to send in his report before he got on a two week cruise and wouldn't be reachable at all...
The last three games that I've had snafus with, this was the process I followed (as instructed by our assignors) - a day or so before, I e-mail both ADs and the other refs on the game to confirm the time and location of the upcoming game. In all cases but one, no response from anyone. The one that responded was nice enough to let us know that the other team had a conflict (JV-B) and the game had to be rescheduled. In the other cases, we got to the field to either find: no away team (school had dates mixed up and didn't realize there was a game scheduled) no home team (game was at a different location and an hour later, but nobody told us or the opposing team) no players from either team (game was scheduled for 1/2 hour later than I was given, but nobody told me). In that situation, they were lucky that I happened to see a couple kids heading to the field just as I was heading to my car to go home. I don't blame assignors for any of this - all the assignors I've worked with are diligent about passing along any updated info that they get in a timely basis. But when you try your best to get updated info from ADs and they never respond, it's really annoying. As a partner of mine said to one of the coaches - if we screw up, you better believe that an e-mail or phone call is going to be sent to the state office. But when the schools screw up, there's really nowhere for us to complain. All we can do is block doing games for a particular school or team. I suppose if a school annoys enough refs, there won't be anyone left to work their games.