Reply to what does your summer team do to recruit officials?

Forum Index » Swimming and Diving

Reply to "what does your summer team do to recruit officials?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'd actually love to get certified in S&T but I'm not a former swimmer myself and so genuinely feel that I lack the necessary experience and skills.  (I can swim, but I never had to get legal in breast or fly myself even though I learned them.)  Most or perhaps even all of our team's officials are former (real) swimmers.  How do other folks feel about this?  What should I do?  In the meantime I volunteer in lots of other ways.[/quote]

I'm not a swimmer but our family's first year on the team someone suggested that I do it and it's been great.  You need to know the rules and how to apply them, and it helps you really understand your child's sport and what's happening.

To answer OP's question, we talk about volunteers at our pre-season parents meeting. We usually have a separate officials interest meeting on deck during one of our early season practices where our officials coordinator and a few current officials hang out to answer questions from parents who are interested.  For critical jobs like ref and starter, the reps and officials coordinator start to talk to good candidate parents a year or two in advance so that they can shadow for a year and see if they like it, and get on the job training in addition to the NVSL classes.

We have lots of experienced parents but always want new ones in all roles so we may pre-populate some shifts with at least one experienced parent so that there is someone to train newbies.  For example this is for things like data table or clerk of course.

We do sign ups through Swimtopia and our website has a description of each role, including whether experience is needed and the type of personality who might fit a particular role.  At B meets, we also split shifts.  It may mean we need more volunteers but it also means no one besides the ref is stuck for a long night which makes things more appealing.
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics