The Ref’s Chair: or,
The Vector of Competing Values in Interscholastic Squash (Part 2)
(Note:
For the sake of simplicity, I have intentionally conflated the roles of
marker and referee, knowing full well that in principle these are
distinct but complementary tasks. My conflation actually echoes common
practice in interscholastic squash, where the roles tend to be more
fluid. [That lack of clarity could be the focus of a whole different
column, but we will leave that thorny question for another day.])
A
scant week and a half after the clash between Tigers and Bears, I
encountered a very different version of questionable, and questioned,
officiating. The setting was the Girls’ C division of the New England
Interscholastic Squash Association championships, and this scene too
focused on the officials’ chairs, and echoed again the difficulty of
performing that challenging task with other visions and values at play.
The
C division featured the ten weakest girls’ teams among New England prep
schools. (In the interest of full disclosure, my own team was competing
there, and I am pleased to inform the DSR readership that we came away
with the Class C championship.) Given that fact, and the fact that each
team brought seven players for the event, there was a wide dichotomy of
skill level and match experience between the highest players on the
strongest teams and the lowest players on the weakest teams.
Those gaps were apparent in the officiating as well, and due to the hot
court system, we sometimes saw uncertainty or indecision on the part of
girls who were refereeing and marking beyond their own comfort level.
That
is to be expected, of course, and we met as coaches prior to the
beginning of the event to talk through our own role in supporting the
work of the officials. As coaches and educators, we expressed a
shared set of values related to protecting the opportunity for these
young devotees to get it right or, failing that, the space to learn on
the job. But our ability to agree in the abstract, with nothing
at stake but our collegial relationships with our fellow coaches, is
not the same as our ability to conduct ourselves accordingly when our
athletes are at week and our teams’ results are at stake. In
other words, just because we agreed in principle doesn’t mean we acted
the same way in practice.
As one of the tournament
organizers, I fielded multiple complaints from coaches about individual
officials’ misdeeds and misdemeanors, which was not surprising.
Less expected were the concerns from coaches about the conduct of our
brethren, and my own team had numerous reports about coaches engaging
with the refs and markers in non-optimal fashion. I guess, given
a range of understanding and experience that mirrors the gaps among our
players, this should not be a surprise. Some of us are brand new
to the interscholastic squash, while some have been coaching for
decades; some of us have competed at a high level, officiated along
similar lines and passed certification courses by national
organizations, while some of us have been assigned this task because of
a passing familiarity with the sport and the ability to drive a
14-passenger van; some of us make a living related to squash,
while some of us undertake our coaching as merely one component of a
prep-school posting. So the conduct of the coaches was neither
optimal nor consensual with regard to our support of the
officiating. But we were far from the biggest problem. And
that was the parents.
A word about the venue is relevant
here. We were competing at St. Paul’s School (NH), which lays
claim to the first squash program in the U.S. With perennial
class A teams on the boys’ and girls’ sides, St. Paul’s boasts a lovely
new facility with 10 international courts. (The “home team,” so
to speak, was away at their respective tournaments and had graciously
loaned us the courts and the support staff.) Those courts were
laid out within the confines of an existing structure on the campus,
rather than a new construction, and are thus arrayed in an unusual
manner. Two courts to the far left face an elevated
gallery; moving toward to center of the facility, you pass five
courts along a corridor; past bathrooms and a kind of library /
lobby, you take a left to get to the last three courts.
With
the exception of the two gallery courts, then, the SPS courts feature
only a corridor between back glass and exterior wall. We tucked a
pair of chairs just outside of the doors of the courts and dropped off
clipboards and iPads (we were mostly able to run the tournament through
software developed by the inimitable Nishad Das from Groton).
Before
we consider any specific scenarios, I invite you to recall the wide
disparities in knowledge and experience on the part of our “officials”
at the Class C tournament. Factor in the mixed messages from
coaches who agreed in principle but behaved differently in practice
with regard to safeguarding their space to carry out these
tasks. Consider the unmediated access of the audience to
these uncertain refs and markers. Now throw in a bunch of parents.
While
they would likely profess similar values to those the coaches espoused,
the parents generally seem to have arrived with a different
motivation. Simply put, they came to support their own
offspring. Given that this support came with a secondary
motivation, of facilitating their children’s success on court, the
parents were anything but disinterested. (Accounts of parental
malfeasance have become legendary in youth sports, but in most of those
pursuits the officials are trained adults doing their work in the
middle of the action, thus at some remove from the crowds.)
Here
again we see three (potentially) conflicting value systems with many
different outcomes on the line. Where the players wanted
primarily to do a good job and their coaches focused principally upon
the development of their athletes, in other words, the parents wanted
to see their children win.
Take these highly
partisan (and highly vocal) spectators and distribute them throughout
the facility, not randomly but in closest proximity to the matches they
had come to see. Have the parents stand near, or even next to or
behind, the novice officials trying to do a difficult job. Now
press “play” and see what happens.
Suffice it to say
that despite a commendable effort on the parts of our young officials,
there were some questionable calls; and take my word for it that the
questioning of those decisions encompassed everything from raised
eyebrows to rolled eyes, from sighs of disappointment to gasps of
disbelief, from sotto voce demurrals to full verbalized debates.
We
got through it, in the end, and to the best of my knowledge, no players
quit the sport as a result of their weekend experience at St. Paul’s,
nor did any parents protest the results on the basis of their
eye-witnessing of the Class C NEISA championship. But this
scenario, much like that featuring the Tiger and the Bear, is another
example of the complications that ensue when we assume shared values
among all participants. I can’t think of much that I, as a coach,
or others could have done to mitigate the circumstances. Instead
of trying to solve these kinds of problems once they have come up,
however, we are better off trying to head them in advance. And
that is where leagues and/or regional and/or national organizations,
with their mission statements and codes of conduct, are essential
arbiters of the conduct that we expect in athletics.
The
clearer we can be about what values we aspire to see embodied in our
sport, and which transgressions we will stand firm against, the better
the chances that we can stay on the same page. Or, at the very least,
the right side of the ref’s clipboard.
