Ok, so it’s clear that I’m not the smartest person in the forum. It takes me a long time to read the words, parse the words, turn the words into ideas, transform those words into thought fragments, and then combine those thought fragments into supportable facts.
I’m two weeks out from my first event where I’m a referee. So I need to have supportable facts from the rules, that I have combined as thought fragments, these words came from ideas that I read from the multi-page rules. But in the BC times (Before Covid), I had the ability to test my fragmented casting and assembly brain functions against far smarter people in order to validate that the few neurons I have left from Covid and Alzheimer were a cohesive set of brain cells that would withstand the withering scrutiny of a middle school robotics team.
Alas the test is not available, any clue RECF people? Or am I bowing to the mercy of the benevolence of a pack of 6th graders?
We use leagues to help our teams prepare for tournaments but they also help our referees practice. Making a mistake has less of an impact on a team’s rank when spread across multiple nights. There is also more leniency from both parties; since we start the season with leagues, the teams are just figuring out the rules at the same time as the refs. This season we called numerous platform DQ’s at the start but that has settled down and now our teams can still play a strong defensive game while avoid the dreaded platform call.
By the time our tournament schedule starts most of our refs will have called over 100 matches. Using experience until the official release of training.
For what it’s worth, the VIQC Referee Training course is now available.
We filmed condensed versions of referee training videos for both VIQC and VRC a couple weeks ago, so those are currently in the editing process. Once they’re finished, they’ll be added to their respective courses as supplemental content.
I keep early season events on longer match cycle - one because teams are rusty, and second because there will be a lot of questions and discussions about the rules at first and second events.
I also make sure that first events are run by referees that have done the job before and can use it as tool to teach new refs by having a pair as scoring refs. Certification is just one facet of referee development.