The horn sounds and you immediately begin hearing those dreaded four-letter words. As you acknowledge the final score and head off the court, you hear the words again and again. One of the coaches says them to you. A few players glance your way and mumble them. Several fans shout them out as you pass by.
Worse yet, as you approach the tunnel to the locker room and join your partners, one of them looks you straight in the eye and says them. Your partner? Yes, even your partner. You cringe, but refrain from repeating them to your partners or anyone else. You know better.
“Good game,” they all say. “Good game.” |
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“I used to hear that all the time when I started officiating,” says George Arredondo, a Pac-10 basketball referee and the high school basketball assignor in the San Gabriel Valley Unit in Whittier, Calif. “I figured I must be a pretty good referee because all I ever heard was ‘good game.’”
Today, Arredondo calls “good game–itis” a disease that plagues officials in all sports. It’s a disease that keeps average officials average.
And the cure? The postgame conference.
“It’s alarming to me how young officials will hear that horn or that gun and they’re gone, off to a bar or a pizza place,” says Arredondo. “I see many high school JV officials who not only don’t have postgames, they don’t even stay to visit with the varsity officials, let alone watch the varsity games.” |
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In all sports and at all levels, there is a great deal of emphasis placed on the pregame, where officials discuss in detail what they plan on doing. Preparation for a game is paramount. That’s obvious. However it’s equally important, if not more so, to have a postgame, where officials can discuss what they actually did.
Jeff Murray has called high school football, basketball and baseball games in Oklahoma City since the 1980s. He strongly believes that the postgame is as important as the pregame, but admits that the temptation to get in the car and go too often gets the best of officials. “My football crew has been together for more than six years so sometimes that comfort level makes it seem like a postgame is not necessary. Well, I remember an inadvertent whistle on a play that we booted and we didn’t take the time to discuss it after the game. Sure enough, a few games later we had the same incident. That won’t happen again. Good postgames will make sure of that.”
At the higher levels, according to Jim Daopoulos, an NFL supervisor of officials, the postgame and subsequent observer assessments and videotape reviews are part of a lengthy, mandatory process. But like Murray, Daopoulos knows that at the lower levels the process is often overlooked.
“And by lower levels I don’t just mean high school. I don’t think college is as critical as it needs to be with the postgame,” said Daopoulos, who worked the Ohio Valley and Southeast conferences before an 11-year career on NFL fields. “Except at the professional level, officials are not held as accountable as they need to be. Good game–itis? Absolutely a problem. I see it all the time. I even hear high school and college observers say it.” |
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