Working With Officials
Working With Officials
Officials facilitate every Ringette game to ensure that players can compete and enjoy meaningful fun in a safe, fair environment. They are empowered to enforce the rules of the game and make decisions to manage the game and participants.
"How is that holding?!"
“How is that holding?!” I heard the coach yell across the ice at my partner after she finished signalling the penalty. I wondered how he expected her, why he expected her, to answer that question. On the surface, it’s a reasonable question. But asked that way, in that tone, at that volume across the ice, it didn’t seem like a legitimate request for dialogue or an opportunity to work through a problem. It was just adversarial.
And that’s really the dilemma these days. We don’t approach problems as a place where we can have dialogue and collaborate. Coaches, players, and even spectators don’t demonstrate that they can work with officials. They want officials to work for them. Due to this adversarial approach, many officials are conditioned to be defensive as soon as a participant expresses a complaint, and they’re not encouraged to work with you, either.
This makes sense, to an extent. Coaches enter into game mode from a leadership perspective. They lead the team; the team takes direction from them. It’s natural to extend that leadership to other aspects of the game when you have a problem. But officials are independent. They’re not there to serve the teams. They’re there to serve the game and the rules. They have the autonomy, the authority, to make decisions and solve problems as they see fit within the framework of the rules and the spirit of the game.
It's important that we’re able to solve problems during a Ringette game. Some solutions will rely on a coach or player to bring the problem to the attention of the officials. You should want those problems solved. As officials develop, they will each have different capacities to problem solve and cope differently when presented with complaints. For you to succeed in garnering successful solutions from an on-ice official, you must be more deliberate in managing your discontent. Put in the effort to calm yourself, and present your concern with more reason and less emotion.
Officials are trained to answer questions, not answer demands. Team staff and players would do well to practice posing their concerns and complaints as questions. Your questions should lead the official to the outcome you think is right. At the end of the day, we might not get the correct solution. But right or wrong, the official’s decision is final.
Penalties for attitude and behaviour
Unsportsmanlike penalties can be assessed for expressing or demonstrating dissent with an on-ice official.
“Dissent: holding or expressing opinions that differ from those of the official”
Officials are encouraged to penalize attitudes only as a last resort. Repeated vitriol, yelling, or unfounded complaints can certainly result in team staff or players being penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct. In every case, this results in a player serving two full minutes in the penalty box without the possibility of cancellation when a goal is scored.
When behaviour continues or repeats after an unsportsmanlike penalty is assessed, this may result in a misconduct penalty. In this case, the penalized participant is ejected from the game. If a player is assessed this penalty, a teammate also serves two full minutes in the penalty box.
In extreme cases, continued or repeated behaviour can result in a Match penalty. Again, this results in the penalized participant being ejected and suspended from future games (as decided by the local governing body). In addition, if a player is assessed this penalty, a teammate also serves four full minutes in the penalty box.