NHSOA Head of Volleyball Responds to Officiating Debacle at LPS Classic
Berk Brown is the founder of Nebraska Prep Volleyball, LLC. He has won 19 awards for his journalistic work during his career, including awards from both the Nebraska Press Association and Minnesota Newspaper Association. In the early 2000s he was a regular contributor for ESPN.com. He has covered, coached and been involved in volleyball for the past 25 years. You can reach him at Berk@NebraskaPrepVolleyball.com.
Berk Brown
Earlier this week, after witnessing an aggressive and hostile lead officiating crew at the LPS Volleyball Classic’s championship bracket on Saturday, I called for an immediate evaluation and reprimand by any and all associations with the authority to do so.
If you would like to go back and read that article you can by clicking here. In a nutshell, the officiating crew let yellow cards fly all day and their judgement and attitide, in my opinion, was the worst I’ve seen in 25-plus years of sports journalism.
Within two days of publishing that article, the head of volleyball for the Nebraska High School Officials Association responded in a memo to officials. Nebraska Prep Volleyball obtained a copy of that memo. In the memo, the head of volleyball for NHSOA had this to say in regards to the performance of the officiating crew that day.
“But what I can say is the referees handled all of these situations correctly.”
It was a very lengthy and wide-ranging memo and there is no need to publish the whole memo and throw gasoline on this fire, which is exactly what would happen.
I can tell you from first-hand knowledge of sitting five feet directly behind the down official all day, the memo from the head of volleyball is filled with inaccuracies which were misrepresented as facts. It’s also clear the memo “facts” were drafted based on conversation only with the officiating crew.
An evaluation based solely on reports given by those who were at fault is the kind of review that only Roger Goodell or an ostrich could be proud of.
Unfortunately, what the volleyball director completely missed is that the officiating issue that day was not so much about whether or not they were making good or bad calls. It was entirely about the fact that the officiating crew was hostile, aggressive, proactively looking for conflict and conducted themselves in a way that lacked clear judgement.
To miss a call is normal, makes you human and there is no fault at all in that. The way the two officials in that crew conducted themselves that day was not normal, it was disgusting and there is fault in that.
I closed my opinion piece earlier this week by saying that what happens moving forward with this officiating crew will say volumes about how serious the Nebraska High School Officials Association is about matching the expectations the NSAA has for its coaches, athletes and spectators.
The response definitely spoke volumes.