MCLA Officiating Fees for 2007 are announced

[laxfan25]

One concern is that the MHSAA does not require schools to use the assignors, although they all do at this point. In several sports (football for sure) the school AD's contract with ref crews outside of assignors.

That smacks of ethical misconduct, if I've ever heard of it. I can't imagine how the MHSAA goes along with individual AD's & coaches handpicking their game officials.

My thoughts exactly! But that is how it's done - the AD selects the ref crew and sends out contracts.

For the post season, the GHSA does all the assigning at the association level. They may tell a certain association that they have to provide a certain number of crews (for a certain number of playoff rounds). But I don't think they hand pick certain individuals to work certain games. It's up to the associations to rate their own officials and dole out playoff assignments.

Here, the MHSAA does the playoff assigning, with suggestions from coaches, assignors and their lacrosse committee - but it's their baby and they have final say in the playoff assignments.

I agree that some of this is growing pains, but there are some things that have made veteran lacrosse officials a little uneasy. While multiple associations can create competition to provide a quality product, it can also lead to competition on game rates, with no recourse.

[culax]

Let's just make sure the coaches (and the whining players) know the rules as well.

In Nebraska this year, all high school head coaches with attend something similar to the referees certification training. Now, this was relatively easy to arrange due to the fact that we only have 7 teams.

[mnref]

One concern is that the MHSAA does not require schools to use the assignors, although they all do at this point. In several sports (football for sure) the school AD's contract with ref crews outside of assignors.

That smacks of ethical misconduct, if I've ever heard of it. I can't imagine how the MHSAA goes along with individual AD's & coaches handpicking their game officials.

My thoughts exactly! But that is how it's done - the AD selects the ref crew and sends out contracts.

For the post season, the GHSA does all the assigning at the association level. They may tell a certain association that they have to provide a certain number of crews (for a certain number of playoff rounds). But I don't think they hand pick certain individuals to work certain games. It's up to the associations to rate their own officials and dole out playoff assignments.

Here, the MHSAA does the playoff assigning, with suggestions from coaches, assignors and their lacrosse committee - but it's their baby and they have final say in the playoff assignments.

I agree that some of this is growing pains, but there are some things that have made veteran lacrosse officials a little uneasy. While multiple associations can create competition to provide a quality product, it can also lead to competition on game rates, with no recourse.

We are just heading into a similar situation here in Minnesota and it sounds like the state high school league (MSHSL here) and the teams do things very similar to how it works in Michigan. Frankly the MSHSL is less involved that I expected and the ADs do an awful lot of the day-to-day work.

In football, ADs generally contract directly with officiating crews for varsity games but that is the exception since ADs only need be concerned with a small number of home games. In most other sports the ADs go through an association that handles the assigning.

We are experiencing a significant learning curve as our officials association starts working with the MSHSL and the ADs. We've always had a pretty close relationship with the club teams which had a more centralized org structure. The varsity teams are much less centralized and the officials are being expected to conform to the way the ADs handle other sport (with reason) rather than the ADs doing things different for boys lacrosse.

We shall see how the transition to state sanctioned sport goes here in Minnesota. But I have said all along, the biggest issues will be with officials with pressure to lower fees, problems with competing leagues, more organizations to deal with.

For everyone else, things really get better. Coaches have less work as ADs help with things like scheduling (yes, coaches do have many more rules to follow but the ADs are there to help - officials have no "experts" to go to with questions like the coaches do). Players really see the benefits with access to school resources like locker rooms, fields and more. Parents and spectators may have to pay to watch games at more sites but I suspect the game times and venues will generally improve.

[Sonny]

Back to the original topic at hand -

Question regarding payment for travel for MCLA games... What if 2 people have to drive to a game? What happens if two (or more) people drive a significant portion of the trip (more then say 40 miles one way)? I fear that this system may create abuse and encourage false reports unless there is significant oversight.

[Kyle Berggren]

Sonny, you are correct. We're dealing with that issue right now in the PNCLL. Send 2 cars 9 hours one way, maybe even 3 cars if they couldn't leave at the same time. It could easily cost $2k to officiate a game. This forgets the catastrophes that happen & officials have to come from further away to make a 3 man crew. Someone has to pay for it.

I hadn't thought about abuse of the situation & the money is an incentive, but it would take some significant collusion to make it happen regularly. Largely the game crews are not the same.

[Chris Larson]

It's incumbent on CAAs to make efficient assignments as an effort to balance the preferences of the officials and the financial interests of the team/conference. Hopefully other conferences have as good a relationship with their CAA as we do in the UMLL - it makes life a lot easier.

[Sonny]

It's incumbent on CAAs to make efficient assignments as an effort to balance the preferences of the officials and the financial interests of the team/conference. Hopefully other conferences have as good a relationship with their CAA as we do in the UMLL - it makes life a lot easier.

Understood and agreed. But in some large metro areas, you may drive 40 - 50 miles across town before meeting 1 or 2 members of your crew before driving another long distance to the end game site.

I'm not sure how this should all work out.

[LaxRef]

It's incumbent on CAAs to make efficient assignments as an effort to balance the preferences of the officials and the financial interests of the team/conference. Hopefully other conferences have as good a relationship with their CAA as we do in the UMLL - it makes life a lot easier.

Understood and agreed. But in some large metro areas, you may drive 40 - 50 miles across town before meeting 1 or 2 members of your crew before driving another long distance to the end game site.

I'm not sure how this should all work out.

The policy states that if you don't show up to the game in youre own car, you get paid the "passenger" rate instead of the driver rate. While I understand what they're trying to do, it does lead to the following extreme situation: three officials each drive to the hotel where they're staying from 300 miles away. One comes from the east, one from the west and one from the south, so they couldn't have carpooled to the hotel. But then they ride together the three miles from the hotel site to the game site, costing two of the guys most of their travel money.

Bottom line: if you get stuck driving most of the way, don't carpool that last little bit.

We were told in our conference that we are expected to carpool if we're coming from the same general area. If for some reason you can't or don't want to, you can either take the passenger rate to drive yourself or you can turn back the game. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.

[kladis]

A couple of things,

HiLineLax, if you want lax growth in Montana, I suggest you keep working with the kids & local Y. I know they put on or were trying to put on a lax event as one of their directors played at PLU a few years ago. If the kids get hooked young, HS will have it, but you have to have feeder programs to have a sustainable HS program.

Kyle:

Growth of the sport with home games would promote growth in interest, and thus potential officials, but.......

It was previously stated that CAA's do a good job traveling all officials equally so they don't just to games in one area, and thus for one team numerous times. Therefore, where the officials live makes no difference logistically. Reason being, even if Missoula and Spokane had officials, they would then travel the same as the officials that now travel to Spokane and Missoula, but in the opposite direction. Travel costs would remain the same, the only difference would be the size of the officiating pool. The fact that costs are absurdly high in the PNCLL is because of the geographical layout, not the ref pool.

Additionally, teams who are part of a conference pay a fee to have officials at their games. Where they live is not relevant. Because officials are in one area, and not in another, should not make games for one team more or less than any others. The league charges a fee to provide the service of providing offials, where they get them should not be of concern, nor financially impact any team.

Also, as Coach Paul mentioned on page one of this thread, teams now days write checks to other teams to get home games. This is something that I know I have begun implimenting at Gonzaga, and I'm sure other teams in geographic areas that make home games difficult will begin doing as well. However, with this officiating prices, they are simply not feasible at the club lacrosse level. For example: We have made a deal with some teams that we pay their hotel accomodations if they come to Spokane for games. An example is USC coming on Feb. 17th. With what has been proposed, this game will cost $1200, which at THE LEAST Gonzaga needs to pay $900. Coupled with the hotel deal, this one game will cost Gonzaga nearly $1800. That is a lot of money for Gonzaga's program and we have 8 home games this year. The math is there, and its simply not reasonable- especially when employing simple, logical, obvious changes like not demanding 3 officials for non-conference games (simple way to cut costs in 1/3rd!!) and flying are not used because of a contract.

[LaxRef]

It was previously stated that CAA's do a good job traveling all officials equally so they don't just to games in one area, and thus for one team numerous times.

My understanding—and I could be wrong on this, but I think this is what I heard—is that with the new fee agreement and travel costs that CAAs have been asked to use local officials whenever possible to cut down on travel costs. I have one colleague who lives in a remote area (that's the opposite of normal: an official living where there are no teams!) and has a severely restricted schedule because of that.

[Kyle Berggren]

Rick, what you're saying is not exactly true... While it would be nice to get the best officials on the most important games, & never have the same official twice, it's simply not possible. We have roughly 33 officials in the PNCLL. If you had even two in Spokane, the officiating cost could go from 1200 for one game, to 500.... We'd be crazy to keep travelling officials. If you had 3, & we could provide officials for $400 instead of $1200. If you want a fee to be equal across the conference, it would have to be slightly over $500 per team, per game.

Also, if teams are travelling to the PNCLL, we need to give them our best. They need 3 officials. What we're hoping to get dropped to 2 is games of PNCLL A vs. PNCLL B.