Regardless of the sporting event you host the one area that you simply can’t scrimp on is the standard of officiating that you put in place.

Failure to supply quality officials will and can result in teams not returning to your function as well as leave a sour taste with the other teams and/or associations for years to come.

Should this happen, it’s tough to recover from and regardless of what you say or send out, it still remains and for whatever reason this is one of the key points to the success you should hope to gather.

The Canada Cup returns for its 24th year to host teams from around the world all searching for that elusive championship trophy.

This year as in the past I had the luxury to chat with David Brewer, Umpire in Chief and asked if there were any international officials attending.

He responded by mentioning that there were none in  his crew, but in the Women’s crew they have umpires from New Zealand, Austria, two (2) from the US as well as local umpires attending all of which should at least have a certification of level three.

It goes without saying that they have a few umpires that is on the way up and quite exceptional that has a certification of level two and if they are unknown umpires, calls are made to inquire of their status.

These umpires will be used for the first three days during the showcase or the select division and when they have the Gold division they are looking for the more experienced umpires to officiate as the games get somewhat tighter in the last few days of the week.

He does his best to “match” umpires in a manner that the up and coming umpires can learn from senior umpires and in some cases the “keeners” surprise him.

Interesting fact is that in the first year for the Canada Cup there were no Women umpires working, but now they have four International umpires, three of which have the WBSC Certification and they are mentors to other young ladies working behind the plate.

As for standards for umpires, Canada is one of the leaders as they developed a program around 1985 and this is what the Softball Canada program is based on and when the umpire in chief was here from New Zealand he took the manual back home to use as a teaching tool as well as looking at improving, so ideas trade to improve the game.

He does the scheduling with around 300 games assigned, probably with 600 umpires assigned as they use three umpire games as well.

Mentioning that not just scheduling but “double booking” can be a nightmare as well as missing a game, which can conceivably happen especially having nine parks and the past weekend they were using ten and eleven parks in use.

He mentions that his first words to the umpires are “let me know if you are double booked anywhere, so I can make the change” and that is common with any assignor for any league.

One issue that they face is the distance traveled from park to park with two supervisors in Cloverdale and he looks after Softball City using between two and four diamonds.

Overall I commend the crew that he has working as they do a remarkable job and should you have other thoughts, please feel free to sign up and be ready to call “Play Ball”!!

This is part one with part two to follow shortly.

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