Worst part about club volleyball season, the refing and scoring clinic. My team was just told that we needed to get certified. One of my teammates actually wrote a blog post about this too! It takes a solid 4 hours to complete, and you already know how to do all of it! Or maybe you know none of it and it's just a lot of rules you don't understand. But push through it, you need to be certified to play club.
Fortunately, you can now do your clinics online, when I was younger, you used to have to actually show up at a lecture and listen to someone speak about refing and scoring. REALLY boring. But, you didn't have to take a test at the end. Now, after you've watched the lesson, you have to pass a quiz about it by at least 90%. Fortunately, you can take a pre-quiz and if you pass it, you get to skip the whole video. That saves a good 20 minutes! Unfortunately, the pre-quiz has like all these trick questions and its just terribly confusing. You probably end up having to listen to the whole video.
Thank goodness for me I passed 3 of the pre-quizzes and didn't waste and hour of my life!
They really should make the videos more interesting because it's very boring. The voices in the video are very monotone and slow and who wants to listen to that on a weekend when you have to listen to that all week at school? NO ONE!
Now that I've done all of my complaining, I do understand why we have to do it every year. It surprises me a lot how much I actually forget from one season to the next. It's a good refresher. Also, some people desperately need the help. I have had teams ref for me that have absolutely no clue what they are doing. What I'm wondering is how the heck did you pass the clinics! It also is really awesome when you are refing and you make this super weird call (like an illegal block, I had never seen one EVER until last year!) and your like , yeah I did know that! They should really make the parents take the clinics too so they wouldn't haggle the refs so often. Parents, settle down, you have no clue what's going on!
Yeah I know it's the most boring 4 hours of your life, but sit tight, it'll help you in the long run!
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I think every single athlete can agree with me on this, EVERYONE HATES POOR OFFICIALS! Unless the calls are going your way of course..:) But, 99.9% of the time, a bad official is going to make bad calls for both teams. Sometimes it is so blatantly bad that your just like, baffled! It has happened to me before MANY times in softball and volleyball. It's just... UGH. That's my best explanation of it. UGH.
There are many different kinds of sports officials. There are referees for many different sports like football and volleyball, an umpire for softball/baseball, and there are judges for gymnastics and diving. I think there are a few sports out there that don't really have an official (consider yourselves lucky). There are people that look for false starts in swimming and track, but that's not something you can really mess up.
The worst thing of ever is that very blatantly bad call. I've had this happen to me more times than I can count because in softball, I am a slap hitter, and almost every single at bat it is a close play. But, it is the most frustrating thing when you have an umpire that calls the play before it already happens. They see the ball hit in the infield and they automatically think that you're going to be out. I have beat a ball out by a solid 2 steps and the ump still called me out. Believe me I wanted to storm out there and give him a good slap in the face!
I can bet $100 that pretty much everyone has seen a professional game where the calls are just botched so horribly. It just happened a week ago in the Steelers v. Ravens playoff football game. I have never seen so many horrible calls against one team in such an important game. It especially peeved me off because the Steelers are my favorite team. My whole family was just yelling at the TV so loud. It would be very unfortunate to be those refs because they probably get a lot of hate afterwards (even though they deserved it in the Steelers game...)
I think the only people who take poor calls worse than the athletes are the parents. I know that it's the worst thing that could ever happen in my dads eyes! He yells at those officials like its his job! I can think of this specific time during softball when I was called out (but was clearly safe of course) he was yelling how horrible the umpire was, and the umpire turned around and said to my dad "I know how hard it is to accept the fact that your daughter was out. I had a kid who played too, and eventually I had to learn to think with my brain not my heart" and this is the best part, my dad said "Yeah well I think with my eyes!". I literally love him so much for that!
So, I think we can all agree that bad officials are the worst thing to plague the planet earth! But if there's one thing I do know, you can't let it affect how the rest of your game is going. That is the worst thing you can do. Just let it go and prove it to them the next time. As my favorite saying goes, "The ball never lies!". Cause it really doesn't. You'll see!
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