Looking Ahead To The 2017-2018 Officiating Season

I'm back!  At least for today.  It's a raining day in the Bay Area and I'm watching some NFL game before going out for a bit.  I hadn't look at my blogs in a while.  However Google had sent a note that some of email accounts were going to expire if I didn't log in so I started looking into things again.

It's been a year or so since I posted and several years since I commented on things.  Since I am here,  I might as well update people on things I've been working on personally and what I am looking forward to as the 2017-2018 high school basketball season is kicking into full swing.

If you look through my blog from around 2011-2012 time frame, you may have seen that I curtailed my officiating for a time due to personal life issues.  I admittedly almost LEFT high school officiating.  Thanks to someone in my group, I decided to stick around.

But one thing the person instilled in me was that if I stuck around, I needed to take the attitude of "constant improvement" versus just being satisfied with where I was.

With that attitude in mind, several things I have been working on:

1. A more confident and vocal persona on the floor as an official.  I used to think was a good official just because I could blow the whistle.  However, I realized that I wasn't as confident in my calls INTERNALLY as I could have been.   Confidence means working on getting better angles but also being able to explain calls to players / coaches.  They may not agree with what you see, but if you can explain it, you're much better off. 
2. Using both my left and right arms to signal foul calls.  Since I'm been officiating, I've always used my left arm for foul calls.  I noticed some officials used both arms.  It's taken a couple of years of focusing on this aspect, but it's pretty much natural for me to use both arms when calling fouls depending on the part of the floor I am on. 

As the 2017-2018 season kicks off, I look forward to just being on the floor and working on my game.  As part of constantly improving, I look to just work on little things no matter what level the game is.   I will make an effort to talk about anything I learned on this blog as I did before or maybe through my podcast.

See you all soon!