Nah, not me, but that’s going to be a major theme this basketball season. This morning one of my favorite crews let me know they had an ill crew member and needed a sub for 7:30PM tonight.
You’d think this wouldn’t be a big deal. It’s just one official in a state with “thousands.” But there are a few things wrong with that assumption. First, almost everyone is already working (and of those thousands, only a subset of them know 3-person mechanics and can work varsity level basketball) and you can’t be more than one place at one time. Second, for some reason still, in 2023, everyone sees Tuesdays and Fridays as basketball days. Consider this week:
Boys basketball:
Monday – 45 games
Tuesday – 162 games
Wednesday – 4 games
Thursday – 93 games
Friday – 146 games
Saturday – 48 games
Girls basketball:
Monday – 27 games
Tuesday – 166 games
Wednesday – 3 games
Thursday – 97 games
Friday – 122 games
Saturday – 33 games
Total:
Monday – 72 games
Tuesday – 328 games
Wednesday – 7 games
Thursday – 190 games
Friday – 268 games
Saturday – 81 games
I won’t even try to suggest Wednesdays — as an official, I like having that day off in the middle of the week and I also know many school districts view this as family night (and there’s a lot of religious education that night as well).
But c’mon. Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays are perfectly fine days to run games. The one that needs to get more focus here, in my opinion, is Monday.
It’s time conferences move some of their scheduling to Mondays. In the conference I assign, we play a 3 games in every 2 weeks schedule. Each team, their initial conference schedule has them playing Tuesday, Friday, Thursday over a 2 week period. When we have a conference blackout day that hits a normal conference day, we use Monday. Perhaps we should start looking at Monday as an alternative to Tuesday, which is when EVERYONE apparently wants to play.
946 games this week and 34.7% are on Tuesday and 20% are on Thursday. If we moved even a third of those Tuesday games to Monday, we’d have a much more balanced schedule and wouldn’t feel the pinch in officiating as much as we do now.
That’s it. That’s my suggestion. Boring blog entry, but I didn’t have a huge amount of time this morning and I wanted to make a quick point.