Sports Officials and Officiating

Science and Practice

Clare MacMahon, Duncan Mascarenhas, Henning Plessner, Alexandra Pizzera, Raôul Oudejans, Markus Raab

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134442775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médecine
• Subtopic: Médecine du sport

Sports officials (umpires, referees, judges) play a vital role in every sport, and sports governing bodies, fans, and players now expect officials to maintain higher professional standards than ever before. In this ground-breaking book, a team of leading international sport scientists and top level officials have come together to examine, for the first time, the science and practice of officiating in sport, helping us to better understand the skills, techniques and physical requirements of successful refereeing.

The book covers every key component of the official's role, including:

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• Training and career development

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• Fitness and physical preparation

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• Visual processing

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• Judgement and decision-making

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• Communication and game management

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• Psychological demands and skills

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• Using technology

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• Performance evaluation

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• Researching and studying officials in sport

Top-level officials or officiating managers contribute in the 'Official's Call' sections, reflecting on their experiences in real in-game situations across a wide range of international sports, and on how a better understanding of science and technique can help improve professional practice. No other book has attempted to combine leading edge contemporary sport science with the realities of match officiating in this way, and therefore this book is vital reading for any advanced student of sport science, sport coaching or sport development, or any practising official or sports administrator looking to raise their professional standards.

1

INTRODUCTION

A Google search for ‘sport science and athlete’ yields 50,200,000 results. In comparison, searching for ‘sport science and referee’ yields 26,200,000 results and ‘sport science and officiating’ yields only 243,000 results. This is not a rigorous comparison and does not account for how relevant each result is for the topics we’d like to compare, which is research on sports officials versus research on sports athletes. Nevertheless, it reflects what we know is true about these areas: there is far more research on athletes than there is on officials. In general this is not surprising when we consider the numbers: there are more athletes than there are officials. In other ways, however, the extent of the imbalance is surprising, given the impact that officials have on the outcome of contests.

One factor that creates a barrier to researching officials as a group is the diversity of the role; there are many different types of officials and a variety of specific demands. We only have to consider the soccer referee next to the gymnastics judge and the tennis linesperson to appreciate the variety of officials. This breadth is clear when we look at the Sport and Recreation New Zealand (SPARC) definition of an official as ‘any person who controls the actual play of a competition by using the rules and laws of the sport to make judgments on rule infringement, performance, time and score. Officials play a key role in ensuring the spirit of the game and/or event is observed by all.’¹ There are a large number of different skills required to control a competition and ensure the spirit of the game, as described by SPARC: ‘Sports officials must be able to bring control to chaos, understand fairness, promote safety, and encourage good sportsmanship. A sports official must have the positive characteristics of a police officer, lawyer, judge, accountant, reporter, athlete, and diplomat.’

Chapter 2 in this text addresses the diversity of officials specifically, introducing the three main types that are referred to throughout the book (interactors, monitors and reactors). This chapter also proposes an adapted model of the different developmental pathways and provides labels for officials at the different stages (e.g., the bread and butter official). The specific stage, category or type of official has an impact on factors such as motives, goals and training, which are all discussed in Chapter 2.

The broad-based understanding of officials as a group, provided in Chapter 2, serves as a foundation to presenting more specific areas of research with this population. Examining the research shows that, in general, the sports official holds a unique place in science. Perhaps due to the variety and complexity of different possible roles as well as the multiple factors at play in officiating, key research on officials that informs practice can be found in areas as diverse as psychology, economics, statistics and mathematics, management and sociology. While we argue that there is still limited research overall with officials, it is interesting to trace research themes over time to gain a sense of the evolution of focus with this population. In early work the emphasis appears to have been bias, personality factors and stress. The focus then transitioned to training activities, including physiological measurement, expert–novice differences and perceptual-cognitive abilities such as judgement and decision making. Areas such as game management and communication, vision and decision training became a focus, as well as management practices, injury, self-efficacy, gender and recruiting and retention trends. Again, these transitions over the last fifty or so years show an acknowledgement of the demands and tasks of the official, an appreciation of the specifics of particular roles and a more sophisticated understanding. Our goal in this book in the main chapters is to bring together and provide an overview of some of the most central findings.

What is also noticeable when perusing the published research on officials is the consistent presence of the topic of stress. The type of stress varies, however, as highlighted in a recent article which categorises five main sources:²

• competing responsibilities (e.g., family, training time) leading to time stress

• a lack of recognition on both an individual performance level and in the role of officials in general

• fear of physical harm from spectators and players

• performance stress and worry about making errors

• worry over conflict with other officials, competitors, and coaches.

This list coincides well with the key areas we review in the chapters that follow: training, development and motivation, perception, management and communication. Our perspective and, hence, emphasis in this book is from the parent disciplines of Psychology, Human Movement and Education. We therefore emphasise the cognitive aspects of officiating – from learning and decision making to factors that have an impact on recruiting, performance and retention. This is often also referred to as expertise research, an area most of us would identify as at least part of our research focus.

An examination of the current edition of the Handbook of Sports Psychology,³ which is a close match to our discipline focus as researchers and which emphasises athletes, shows how multifaceted sports psychology is, in general. It also shows how limited is the research with officials, and how far behind that with athletes. This is evident because many of the topics in the handbook that are examined in athletes are not touched on with as great depth – if at all –with officials. Specifically, the handbook includes main sections, with multiple chapters in each section, on:

• motivation, emotion and psychophysiology

• social perspectives (with chapters on leadership and self-presentation)

• sport expertise, outlining skill acquisition, anticipation and attention

• interventions and performance enhancement, with eight chapters covering mental skills, sports injury, choking and pre-shot routines

• physical activity and health psychology covering areas such as burnout and mental health

• life span development, outlining topics such as career transitions and termination

• methodological and measurement issues in research.

An additional special topics section covers disability, alcohol and drug abuse, and gender and cultural diversity. Again, many of these topics are relevant to officials but have not been researched with this population. For this reason, at this stage of the research with sports officials, these areas are used as a general base of knowledge for officials. We have selected, however, to emphasise the most central concerns from the expertise and cognitive perspectives. Hence, our chapters cover eight core topics (Chapters 2–9).

The acknowledgement of differences between officials from Chapter 2 leads us into the research on physical demands and evaluation. Chapter 3 acknowledges that many officials have high physical demands, outlining the training and evaluation of officials. The pervasive use of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to track activity patterns has led to a much more detailed knowledge about the on-field distances covered by officials (emphasising soccer referees as the most studied group) and the type of activity used (e.g., running, walking). This information has in turn helped to drive training programmes. Chapter 3 presents these data, discusses how fitness is measured, and presents information on the relationship between physical demands/fitness and decision making.

Chapter 4 focuses on an area we often think of as the heart of officiating – vision and visual perception. We review the fascinating research around vision and the sports official, and how this can have an impact on the decisions that are made. We discuss the process of deciding what to take in and pay attention to, as well as how positioning can lead to errors of perception and thus judgement. This leads in to a discussion of practical suggestions and training for this skill. Again, this chapter emphasises the soccer referee as the role most often examined in the research.

The extensive work on judgement and decision making in sports officials is presented next, in Chapter 5. Here we move beyond perception and attention and distracting cues, as discussed in Chapter 4, and concentrate on the steps of information processing from the knowledge that lies under decisions, to how the information in the environment is perceived, then categorised and integrated with this knowledge to result in a decision. We touch on the impact of colour and home ground on decisions.

A key area that has emerged in acknowledging the complexity of the official’s role is that of game management. This is central to the interactor official and involves communication with players and coaching personnel (and parents and spectators). As one of what may be referred to as ‘intangible’ or soft skills that are critical and can make or break an official, game management and communication is worthy of the attention it receives in Chapter 6. While Chapter 5 discusses the biases that can arise from context, Chapter 6 acknowledges that the use of context is often an essential skill in decision making and communication. Officiating style and philosophy are discussed, as is the key communication construct of corporate theatre.

Psychological skills, as a search for journal articles on officiating reveals, are critical in officiating. Chapter 7 tackles this area and emphasises mental skills such as self-talk, imagery and pre-event routines. A highlight of this chapter is its applied nature, setting out, for example, guidance on appropriate features of successful goal-setting.

The last few decades have seen a dramatic increase in both the use and the potential use of technology in sports officiating. As Chapter 8 points out, however, technology use in sports officiating has been around since automated timing was introduced. Moreover, there is a danger that spectators believe technology is immune to error. To gain some perspective on how technology can be used, this chapter reviews methods which are used to complement and contribute to officials’ decisions, and those which replace the official as judge and decision maker.

Chapter 9 takes the preceding chapters into account and presents the training implications. It also outlines issues in the recruitment, selection and evaluation of officials. It touches on coping with the stress that officials inevitably experience, increasing the volume of decision making encountered by using video-based training, and methods and models used in the difficult task of evaluating performance.

A final concluding chapter reviews the themes and overall messages from the preceding chapters, and provides perspective on the state of the field and the next evolution for needed advancements in research on sports officiating for practice. As a whole, we anticipate that some of the findings and conclusions presented in this book will be unsurprising to practitioners, prompting responses that indicate ‘we’ve always known this’. We see this as a positive, showing the coherence of the research with practice. We also see, however, that officiating research is developing and is beginning to move to more informative stages, as we discuss in Chapter 10. The further development of the field is shown in the studies presented throughout the book that go beyond confirming what has previously been known, and move to more informative and sometimes surprising findings. In fact, it is the combination of useful theory as well as practice that defines a finding that has impact. The entire field will soon arrive at this stage. Chapter 10 provides some perspective on questions and research that have both theoretical or discipline impact, as well as applied impact.

As a concluding point in introducing this text, we acknowledge the barriers to research in officiating from both the practitioner’s (officiating manager and/or officials themselves) and the researcher’s perspective. These are the barriers that contribute to the smaller volume of work compared to that with athletes, and are outlined in Table 1.1.

As the table indicates, the res...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Development Of Officials
• 3 Physical Demands
• 4 Visual Perception
• 5 Judgement and Decision Making
• 6 Interaction and Game Management
• 7 Psychological Demands and Skills
• 8 Technology
• 9 Selection, Training and Evaluation of Performance
• 10 Conclusion
• Index