RingoWant to know what pretty much every major sport in the nation has? Fans, probably. Also likely athletes. Drama. A bunch of insider memes that no one else gets but they find hilarious? Training discussions and coaches and like it turns out there’s a lot of commonalities throughout sport? Who would have thunk?
So rather that list them all, which would take a lot of research and analysis I’m way too lazy to do, or wait for you the reader to answer, because like, that’s not how blogs work and would be super inefficient, I’m just gonna tell you the thing I’m thinking about, and god damn was that a run on sentence. I’m not even mad. I’m impressed at my inability to break up a thought into multiple….wait fuck this, back to the point.
A refs org, that’s the thing that every sport has. An organization that existsto facilitate Reffing, not just the writing of rules, but the training of officials, the interpretation of rules, the keeping of ref stats, and other ref things. The only exception I could find was Ultimate Frisbee, which doesn’t actually have refs. Most sports seem to have at least one org dedicated to officiating, rules, and process and another dedicated to managing leagues, matches and tournaments, though sometimes there is a hierarchical relationship. Some sports have the parent org that oversees everything but under and separate from it are the orgs that run the national team, the orgs that run the leagues and tournaments, and the org that manages refs. These orgs act as facilitators for the leagues that are part of them and that may be something we would do well to look at, in particular the US soccer model and the Roller Derby model. For example in the US there is one org that governs the whole sport of soccer, the United States Soccer Federation (USSF). It doesn’t directly oversee Professional soccer though, leaving that to individual orgs like the MLS and NWSL. It does handle rules and provide training resources for refs. However there are even many sub groups under that dedicated solely to reffing, for example in NH we have the New Hampshire State Referee Committee. Reffing is a prioritized role from the top all the way down. The USSF is even actively removed from the national team selection. Instead it appoints a coaching staff and lays down a process for them to follow. But this is not the time for me to continue my tilting at the windmill of running an actual season-long analysis of fighters and training camps that double as tryouts. It may be the system that works for every olympic and national team I’ve heard of, but that’s neither here nor there for the purpose of this diatribe.
Here I will talk about the need to improve our reffing, something I think no one will disagree with, and how an org design with that goal will, unsurprisingly, help achieve that. For that we should look more closely at the Roller Derby, a small dedicated following of a niche sport, that is very rough. Our goal with any org we make should be better consistency, fairness, an increase in safety, and overall better experience for everyone. I will bring up how separating the training and tracking of officials from the running of a league or tournament will improve the officiating. The independence will remove incentives to listen to league or event organizers leading to more impartial calls. Regardless of how firm and fair a ref is, there is always an incentive to listen to the boss who runs the thing, which may cause them to weigh certain ideas more subconsciously. Lastly the accountability of an org that tracks and runs post-mortems specifically for officiating will lead to continual improvement.
Lets start with the problem statements.
- A lack of consistency in rules. There are multiple International rule sets in existence and use in America and also a variety of interpretations of them. Then there are multiple deviations from those used in domestic fighting. As such, tracking what rules are in use and where can become quite a complex task.
- Confusing rules and unclear guidelines for adjudication in general. There are multiple examples of rules that are ripe for misinterpretation in both major rule sets. Whether this is due to translation issues for original texts or simply a lack of rules lawyers nit picking every word, it makes for some real problems in knowing what is and is not legal.
- Reffing is not easy. Many sports have multiple refs with different jobs, similar to ours. However usually those refs are still watching the same basic game. The difference between singles and melee is an entirely different rule set and the differences within each sub set are not as trivial as they may seem on paper. In particular learning how to call things, where to look, how much to stop etc, is very hard to just scale up from 3’s to 5’s to 10’s to 12’s to 16’s to 30’s and up. Keeping track of that many fights is hard enough. Add in the difficulty of seeing weapons move, how armor and tabbards hide things, and determining the subtle difference between touching the ground and putting weight on it…its not fucking easy. As I’ve said before. https://lifeasaswordsman.wordpress.com/2017/06/16/imcf-retrospective-part-2-my-experience-reffing-and-why-everyone-should-marshal/
https://lifeasaswordsman.wordpress.com/2017/06/23/imcf-retrospective-part-3-melee-marshalling-and-miscelaenous-musings/ - Training is not good. There are probably some people who have been trained well, but like how much continuing education is there for training? How much has been written and discussed about the tradeoffs of continuing a play and missing a call vs interfering and getting calls right? About what are the best angles to stand at and lines to run as a ref? How much footage is studied and then made into training materials showing examples? How many ref training events are there a year? I know HMB is getting their act together here and perhaps IMCF is following, but like domestically we are still way behind. I’ve possibly been to as many events where there are “dedicated refs” as I have been to ones where a random support staff just there to learn the sport, or even someone’s Significant Other, gets Voluntold into being a counter. What passes as qualifications for veteran refs is sometimes just, “I did it before at this back yard event.” For Counters, it’s often, “have you fought or watched fights?” “Then surely you know how to judge blows.” Our training in my experience is sometimes passably competent, but often terrible or nonexistent.
- There is a lack of faith in officials. I would love to point to survey data showing people’s feelings for the quality of reffing…but I’m an idiot and forgot to include a question about that in the survey I just did. So instead, I have to rely on private and public grumblings, which is a thing all sports have. However in my experience the grumblings are louder than in any other sport I’ve been involved in, which includes soccer, so think about that. It seems to me we’re FIFA level bad…worse even. If people don’t respect the refs it can create all sorts of problems.
I don’t mean this to denigrate the people who perform Reffing duties now. We are a new sport and have been in a perpetual state of chaos from the jump. As far as I know there are fewer events that pay refs in the states than swords in my armor bag. It’s a hard job that is made harder by the nature of the sport and the external politics that surround it. Further, far too few active fighters are willing to step up, which means we rely often on people with few hours of experience watching the sport outside of the context of reffing. Many, if not most,people who know the sport well are active fighters, which can mean that that knowledge is not transferring into the reffing community.
This is why I think we need an org that makes reffing their PRIMARY purpose, if not sole purpose. I think time spent creating a certification process, one separate from either international org but teaching both rule sets, as well as domestic spin offs, would help improve the quality of reffing, the faith in the refs, the understanding of the rules, the consistency of calls and officiating. I think a group that actively worked to do post-mortems of events and tried to figure out how to make calls better, and what calls worked would lead to better ref training and best practices reffing events. I think reviews of events could lead to identifying teams and fighters who consistently violate rules if they exist and help keep the sport safe. I think trying to track refs can also help improve individual refs skills.
I also think simply making an org will help organize the ref community better. It will lead to more discussions with that as a priority. It will lead to pressure to getting refs paid, which should incentivize more and better refs. While in the beginning it will be hard to achieve a lot of the tasks and goals above, it can start with some achievable goals. A single event dedicated to refs improving skills and training, a set of training videos with common variations of tricky calls, and a (for the moment) unofficial guide for how to interpret the rules as written and how to adjudicate them in practice.
An eventual goal of this org would be to oversee and make official the rules for most domestic fighting. However getting to that point requires doing the work of improving the current interaction with the rules. It requires getting the community to have faith in the org. It requires developing a core mission and philosophy that can be used to inform that eventual growth. It should not be to RUN leagues or perhaps even tournaments. A split in focus means having incentives of how to cater to fighters and/or fans bumping up against trying to improve reffing. Worse, during an event the Ref should have no hierarchy in which they are under people running the event, running teams, or running leagues…which at the moment are often the same people.
It will still happen as we grow but the potential conflict of interest is never good. For one thing it is a perception issue where the faith in the refs will be called into question, particularly if any call goes in a way that hurts one team or fighter, but could be seen as improving the event, the team, or league the ref is associated with. Worse still, unconscious biases are well known to affect all people without their awareness so even the most “honorable” of men will still be at risk of fucking up a call that supports their bias.
I don’t know how we get there from here. I think both AMCF and ACS are positioned in a way to manage this if they wanted to, but it does not seem to be THE focus of either org. ACS seems focused on running events, which I highly support in terms of growing domestic fighting. AMCF seems focused on building for the international team and trying to facilitate communication from HMB and IMCF to fighters. HMB USA is currently actively working on improving the reffing for those events…but there are often less than a dozen HMB events a year in the US, and not that many more if we includeCanada. I’m unaware of Mexico’s events, and that’s a thing I need to get better at. Perhaps there is a way to leverage the work HMB USA Marshalls are doing and expand that to a league-agnostic org? Perhaps there is a way to push either org mentioned above to make that a priority.
Or maybe it is to make a new separate org, completely unaffiliated. I always hate adding new bureaucracy and new points of contact, as it complicates things. It also often is harder to grow a new thing than expand an existing thing in terms of people’s buy -in. Getting people to believe in the organization is as important as having it and having good work. I don’t know. I also don’t know if I have the energy to do any of this work, all of this work, or even drive/support others doing it. But it is a thing I think needs to be done….so hopefully I or (let’s be real) someone else, figures out a way.