![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
annie commented that she thought it was a very impressive tomato.
I am an official in the United States Curling Association. I'm certified Level II (of IV) and accumulating the credits necessary to advance to Level III; this means I am of medium seniority, and can (and have been) the second-ranked official at an event with genuine stakes and consequences. (I could be the Head Official, even, with a net, that is, with someone of Level III or IV to assist. My Head-ship would not be nominal -- the assist-y person wouldn't be supervising -- but I would still not be the most senior official, if you see what I mean.) In my capacity as an official, I am sometimes called upon to do things I don't like doing. It's a game we love, and it's no fun to be the timing supervisor who has to tell a team they've just lost a game they were (up to that point) winning on account of they ran out their clock before they were done. (That's the penalty. Each team gets 75 minutes to play their game, and they can't use any of the other team's time, and if they haven't played all their rocks in every end or conceded the game to the other team by the time the clock runs out, the game is over and the team that's out of time loses. It sucks.)
It's even less fun to have to do that sort of thing when you know the players affected, which, this being a smallish community, and officials not in most cases having their expenses reimbursed (and thus doing more work locally than distantly), can happen. Such as the time this past January when one Qualifying Round of the USCA men's playdowns was at my club.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hagar37 was the head official, and for the final tie-breaker (which involved a team skipped by a guy from our club), he was watching the hog line while I was the on-ice supervisor at the far end. And along about the third end, over my headset comes hagar37's voice telling me the skip had hogged his stone -- had still been holding onto it at the hog line. The penalty for this is that the rock comes out of play, which is of course quite severe. People are often not aware they've done it, because they're concentrating on the shot, and they're often upset to be told they've done it, because the shot they were concentrating on matters a lot (or they might not have been concentrating quite so hard, so they might have been paying more attention to the hog line).
It takes about twenty seconds, at the speed this shot was coming, for a rock to come from one hog line to the other house. Plenty of time for me to look athagar37 with an expression of "Ah, god, really? please don't make me" and him to look back at me with an expression of "Sorry, dude, you know the rulebook", before I stepped in and pulled the rock before it hit anything.
True story.
It's even less fun to have to do that sort of thing when you know the players affected, which, this being a smallish community, and officials not in most cases having their expenses reimbursed (and thus doing more work locally than distantly), can happen. Such as the time this past January when one Qualifying Round of the USCA men's playdowns was at my club.
hagar37 was the head official, and for the final tie-breaker (which involved a team skipped by a guy from our club), he was watching the hog line while I was the on-ice supervisor at the far end. And along about the third end, over my headset comes hagar37's voice telling me the skip had hogged his stone -- had still been holding onto it at the hog line. The penalty for this is that the rock comes out of play, which is of course quite severe. People are often not aware they've done it, because they're concentrating on the shot, and they're often upset to be told they've done it, because the shot they were concentrating on matters a lot (or they might not have been concentrating quite so hard, so they might have been paying more attention to the hog line).It takes about twenty seconds, at the speed this shot was coming, for a rock to come from one hog line to the other house. Plenty of time for me to look at
hagar37 with an expression of "Ah, god, really? please don't make me" and him to look back at me with an expression of "Sorry, dude, you know the rulebook", before I stepped in and pulled the rock before it hit anything.True story.
no subject
no subject