Clearly Kyle, that person yelling at the ref’s was me
Clearly your family is quite small
Clearly Tripping is not when a player stands on the opponents stick and asses over on his way off the bench is it? – If you believe what we all saw on Saturday then oh yes it is.
[/quote:d1qwkh4i]

1. OK, classy.
2. He’s not very small, but he’s only 13. And he’s a new official who was doing the training that weekend, and watching people abuse the referee who is going to be running the training isn’t really going to encourage him, or others. Also I found it offensive personally. There’s reasonable things to call out to a referee, and then there’s just yelling abuse. I assume Stampede want people to be able to bring their kids to the game and not witness that sort of behaviour.
3. It wasn’t a tripping call, it was a hooking call. It was a fairly standard hook – stick across the Swarm player’s chest preventing them from driving to the net. Why it was cause to call out “shit call”, and “arsehole” to the referee, I have no idea, but there was nothing wrong with the call.

I won’t dispute that there’s a lot of people around who do more work for the NZIHL and don’t get paid. I do more work off-ice for NZIHL then I do on-ice each season. I don’t think that changes the fact that officials are underpaid in the NZIHL, NZJEL, and at nationals, particularly if you want to reserve the right to hurl abuse at them when you disagree with them. I generally don’t expect to be paid for the work I do for Southern or Dunedin – and I’m not – but officials should be paid and should be paid more than they’re getting at the moment.

we aren’t talking about crowd perception here.  People who don’t have a clue about the game can bitch and moan if it feels it supports their team.  I don’t care about them.  Those who know the game (and there are a lot who play nzihl) appreciate a well called game.  We expect the refs to do the job at the best of their ability and to strive to be better.  Players bitching and moaning happens in the NHL even.  You can’t use that as an excuse.
[/quote:3tiw5nfl]

First off, every NZIHL officiating changing room I’ve ever been in – which is about 15 or so times now all the officials have been striving to do better. Sometimes they don’t have the information or perspective to get better, but normally after each period there’s a discussion between the officials about what needs to be better next period. It’s more difficult for the referees as they often don’t have anyone to point out what they’re doing wrong, whereas us linesmen typically have a referee telling us how we’re not helping them. Maybe it’s different up in Canterbury or Auckland, but I doubt it.

Secondly, I’m not using players bitching as an excuse – or if I have, please point it out. I’m saying, if there are players and coaches and other people who think officials have had a bad game, and those players and coaches are flat our wrong, then the officials really don’t have a case to answer. It’s a waste of time trying to get better to satisfy someone who doesn’t know the rules and procedures, and who is trying to get you to make bad calls. We have to strive to get better, not to make uninformed people happier.

Yes officials have good and bad games, and some officials are definitely better than others. No secret there. We’ve had some discussion here about ways that they can get better, and I know that some of them are being worked on. But it’s a long term project, and if you’re concerned about NZIHL referees – it takes years for a new official to reach that level, and it requires structures and money to help the existing ones get better.

Some people are of the opinion that officials are the worst thing in the league, personally I think it’s player attitudes to officials. It won’t be long before we have some officials choose to give up the game because they’re sick of the abuse. The money is crap as well. It’s not just the NZIHL either, a NZJEL coach’s behaviour that I saw after they lost a game – appalling that that person is paid to coach youth hockey.

teams aren’t selecting those players in abundance anymore Kyle
[/quote:27tgmgu2]

Oh c’mon. Wasn’t there a fight during the handshake between Thunder and Red Devils? Who the hell fights during the handshake? Two players who have represented their country. Classy.

The reffing needs to improve.  There is no getting away from that.  There are players who will eventually be weeded out from the league for doing the dumb stuff you mention.
[/quote:3m5792nl]

Sorry when will that be happening? I’ve been waiting a couple of years, are further directions needed? Teams still seem to be selecting those players.

If players, coaches, and supporters of the league want better officials, they probably need to cough up about $10K/season. Half to go towards bringing all NZIHL officials together in north and south island training weekends, which would do fitness, rule testing, cover the material at the TRIM meeting, and probably run officials through games using premier league teams. There are close to 25 officials who do national league games across the country and attendance should be compulsory to get games in the upcoming season.

The other half to fly in senior referees for each round to act as supervisors. We’ve started doing this with some rounds, but it’s somewhat haphazard, and it’s not always a senior official doing it. There’s limited training that can be done with officials without seeing them do actual games, in much the way that you learn a lot about players and coaches when they actually play.

You need to remember that the training that your national league official might have had might be as little as 12 hours. They might have had some supervision for a few games after that. Compared to players who might have had over a thousand hours of training on and off the ice, constantly supervised by coaches. The commitment carries through to the NZIHF, who until recently employed a Coaching Coordinator, who provided good services to clubs and coaches. The referee coordinator is an unpaid volunteer with limited resources or budget.

If you take southern officials who are stepping forward and trying to cover local games  – we don’t have any local contact leagues to build up our skills, and even if we make one – as Dunedin has – there’s no senior official to supervise us and help us improve.

Like Paul, I find player knowledge and attitude pretty frustrating. I’ll happily accept that I’m an average official at best. But I get really sick of players yelling at me, particularly when they’re yelling at me to make a call that I just made, yelling at me because they don’t know the rules, or yelling at me because they’re not winning. If I’m going to devote 4 hours of my weekend to helping an ice hockey game happen, for $20-$30, it’d be good if players wouldn’t do that. I’ll happily keep on working to become a better official if they try and work on being less of a dickhead.

There’s going to be progress with officials over the next couple of years, as we have a new referee-in-chief and he’s not afraid to say it when his officials aren’t doing things right, and what they need to do to get better, and to admit that to teams. I saw that a couple of times over the weekend.