Lessons From Other Sports

[Editor's note: A couple of years ago I posted a handful of articles to my Facebook page that was intended to be a on-going series called The Art Of Officiating Roller Derby. I thought I'd repost them here, since they still seem relevant. This one's from the halcyon days of October 2010. –3db]

Officiating roller derby can be described as a science. The ruleset is complicated, hard to read, and full of corner cases that a good official has to be able to apply in the blink of an eye. There are several different referee and official positions, all of which have their own requirements and skill sets. Rules study alone can take hours a week if you're particularly dedicated; then there's the time you put in at league scrimmages, nights spent working on your skating skills, and so on.

But I think that officiating roller derby can also be described as an art, and I don't think many of us consider that aspect when we talk about becoming better officials. Some of my favorite derby moments are when I get to work with a crew that really clicks -- when the communication is good, when officials back each other up, when the refs are working well with the NSOs and everything is just running smoothly. No one feels like they're going off into the weeds. And most importantly, the skaters feel like the officials have the game under control and are doing their job to keep the game safe and even-handed.

In that regard, I think that officiating roller derby is a lot like officiating other sports. I'm a big sports geek, not just for derby but for lots of other sports, and I pay particular attention when discussions of the refereeing comes up. If you look at it with the right eye, a lot of the same sorts of things that get talked about in other sports are relevant to ours as well, and I think we would be well-served as a community of officials to pay attention.

Here's an example that sort of blurs the lines between art and science. Say what you like about baseball or softball – they aren't my favorite sports by any means – but one thing I have noticed is that their officials are very concerned about the art and science of their job. A couple of years ago I was linked to this page. It's horribly formatted and somewhat repetitive, but it includes a couple of really interesting pointers that I'll summarize here. Remember, this is a baseball umpire speaking, but I think the lessons are directly applicable to derby.

1. Anticipate the play, not the call. The corrolary is "No play is 'routine' until it's over." As a referee you need to be able to know intuitively where the play is going to happen, and what all the possible outcomes (legal and illegal) might be, but you must not predict what the outcome of the play is going to be. When you know where the play is, you can position yourself correctly to see the outcome and make the proper call based on what you see. The "science" here is the positioning, but the "art" is the intuition that comes with experience: knowing how the play is going to develop and where you need to focus your attention in order to make the right call. The blend is knowing whether or not you're in the right position, and as a skating referee, having the skating ability to adjust your position if you aren't.
2. Positioning is about distance and angle, but angle is more important than distance. In a sport like derby where we don't have the option to skate onto the "field" in order to improve the distance between us and the play, this one should be somewhat comforting. It is also part of the reason that Outside Pack Refs exist. It may sound like I'm only talking to Jammer Refs here, but I think that Pack Refs (Inside and Outside) need to anticipate where the action is going to be and adjust their position just as much as Jammer Refs do. Of course, Pack Refs have many more "plays" to watch and generally don't have as much time between the to adjust their position -- which just makes it more important that you're in the right place to begin with.
3. Refereeing an action is a two-part process: making the call is mental, making the signal is physical. You should complete them in that order, which means don't make the signal until you've seen the complete outcome of the play. There is so much emphasis placed on the fact that derby is call-as-you-go, and play doesn't stop for a penalty, and so we have to make penalty calls as quickly as humanly possible. But reconsider point #1: you absolutely can not make a call until the play is over, and you can't make the right whistle-and-hand signals until you know what the call is. You will serve yourself as well as the game much better if you pause the extra half-second to see whether or not the target of that illegal hit fell down or went out of bounds, before you try to make the hand signal.

I think that we as derby officials can learn a lot from some of the stuff that gets written by umpires from all sorts of other sports. It's not hard to apply their lessons to our sport even though the mechanics are often quite different. I hope to write a lot more as I collect more of these bits of wisdom from across the sports landscape, but I'm also curious to hear from other derby officials about things that they've picked up from watching and reading about sports.