New Referee Grades Announced

Below is a newsletter sent out from the national office that you have all probably seen if not, you need to make sure your CIPP reflects your status as a referee! Let me take a moment to help you understand better what this means to us in the Midwest. I will start by going through the announcement:

Local referee grades are now "L" followed by a number. L3, 2, and 1 correspond to C3, 2 and 1. L4 is recommended as the terminology for a beginning, unrated, referee.

This is the first noticeable change that starts 1 January. Our beginning referees will now be designated as L4 and rise up through to L1 the old D and up through C1]. The conversion factor is straightforward, and if you were a C2 last year, you are an L2 this coming year. This should not be too confusing and is a change in naming only.

There is a single territorial grade known as T. All current B3, 2 and 1 referees will be members of the T Panel as of the New Year. At the USA level are the National Focus Group, National Panel, and International Panel. The performance criteria for earning L1 and T were made slightly more difficult than the corresponding criteria for C1 and B3 in the old system, by moving some of the Elements down a notch. However, any reports written through the end of 2009 showing above-grade performance for a C2 or C1 referee by the old criteria will still be considered valid as above-grade reports towards promotion in the new system for L2 or L1 referees.

The impetus behind this change arose at the budget meeting of the R&L last July. The requirements for getting promoted through the B grades were essentially impossible to fulfill at the local and territorial level: the requisite-level games were all national appointments. You almost had to somehow earn national panel status in order to be assigned the games necessary to earn national panel status. Mike Cobb led a working group comprising Don Morrison, Peter Watson and Tom Coburn that considered the ramifications and developed the procedures for implementing such a system.

Merging the territorial grades increases opportunities: it allows any T panel referee to show above-average performances on games that are available to be assigned territorially. The T Panel is now a college in which you don't automatically move up, but neither do you have to spend a minimum number of years there. High scores on a series of reports will bring you national appointments and opportunities for graduate work. Territories are of course free to rank-order their Panelists if they wish, based on the scores achieved on Evaluations. These rankings may be public or not, and ways may be found to acknowledge and commemorate landmark appointments that constitute advancement within the Panel.

Impact to the Midwest B panel referees will be that they ALL will now be considered “T panel referees”. There will be a transition for making assignments…. In the past, higher level matches were usually given to B panels based on their B level: B1 highest level matches, B2 next highest, etc. This will eventually change to assignments that will be made based on the history of evaluation scores. The concept is to transition to an assignment process based on performance and not based on longevity at a particular level. As mentioned above, it may be a bit harder to get into the T panel, but once in, getting matches at the higher levels will not depend on making it up through three levels of B panels, with ‘required’ longevity at any particular level. Assignments will be based on performance and consistency of performance over time regardless of past performances or how long you have been a T panel referee. Over the next several seasons, as we get more and more evaluation scores based on the new element definitions, we will be able to transition into such a performance based assignment system.

One more change was implemented to avoid confusion over the term 'L2'. Until now we have had Level 1 and Level 2 reports written on referee performance. The old Level 1 reports are now called Coaching Reports and the old Level 2s are now simply Evaluations.

This should be self explanatory; let me know if you don’t understand the difference between a Coaching Report [no score] and an Evaluation [scored].