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Football Officiating Crew Comradery

Just like many other things in life that include groups, an officiating crew must have communication and comradery to be effective. Football officiating crews need to work well together if they want the season to be successful. Here are some ways to help your crew be successful. If you have and comments or questions, please feel free to reach out to me here . The first thing Football officiating crews need to do is get together before the season. Make sure everyone knows each other. Just spending some time together and learning things about everyone will make a huge difference when working together. Talk mechanics and philosophies together. There are many different ways to do things in football officiating. There needs to be a time that the crew talks mechanics through. What hand signals are you going to use? How are you going to handle spots on long passes and runs? What communication do crew members want throughout the game? Make sure you know all of this before the first ga
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How to Best Take the Football Rules Quizzes and Tests

Taking football officiating quizzes and tests can be one of the hardest parts of the whole season for many officials. I personally find the tests to be the hardest. But why are they so hard and what are some tips to help you through them? Let me try and help you out with that question. To start, many great officials struggle on tests. In my experience, tests do show how well you know the rules, but doesn’t always quite correlate to the type of official you are on the field. Reading a question and seeing something on the field are two very different things. Additionally making test hard is the fact that on tests, things happen that honestly never happen in a game. But they help you think through complex chains of events. Therefore, to help you get through the test successfully, sit down with your rule book and case book and work through each question slowly. Picture the play happening in your head and everything you are dealing with. Go to the rule book and case book and read up on
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What are Reasons you shouldn’t be Officiating for?

Early on, I went through some reasons that people should decide to officiate football. However, there are also some reasons people shouldn’t choose to officiate. The main two reasons you should not let yourself take the leap and become a football official is so that you can officiate in the NFL and so you can make good money. While those things may happen to some people, it is EXTREMLY rare. When you think of all of the thousands upon thousands of football officials at every level across the country, there are only about 125 NFL officials in the whole world! Anyone who is officiating to make it to the NFL, they may want to look at the percent chance and just buy a lottery ticket instead! Even making it to be an official in the Big 10 is extremely rare. Additionally, people that decide to officiate to make a lot of money because they heard how much some professional officials make, they may be in for a rude awakening. Yes, most of the time officials get paid nice amounts for the gam
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Equipment- Part 3

For this third and final equipment post, I will be helping you know what clothes you need for your uniform to officiate football. I saved this for last since many times, people have the most questions on this part. However, before I get going, I wanted to tell everyone that earlier I strongly recommended you join your area officials association, you can read that post here . If you do, many times people have extra clothes or equipment they are giving away for free! Take advantage of that as just another reason to go to an association meeting. To start, you need some shoes. There are many out there and all different brands. Try to find a store in your area that sells them and try some on to see which are most comfortable to you. Also talk to other officials to see what their favorites are. With your shoes, make sure you have black socks. You will also need officiating pants. These are black with a white stripe down the side. College and High school officials where the same pant
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Equipment- Part 2

No matter if you are starting to officiate high school or college football, almost everyone has questions about what equipment they need. In this part two blog, we will cover bean bags, flags and game cards. I will try to give you the basics and point you in the right direction of where to get it. Like always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to let me know here . When it comes to bean bags, what color you need depends on the level of football you are officiating. If you are going to be officiating football at the high school level, you need blue bean bags . If you will be officiating college, you need black bean bags . Bean bags can be skinny and long or just one big pouch of beans. Which type you get is completely up to the official. For every game, you should have two bean bags on you, especially if you are a back judge. For flags, high school officials use all yellow flags while college officials have the ball of their flag black . You can buy them like th
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Equipment- Part 1

No matter if you are starting to officiate high school or college football, almost everyone has questions about what equipment they need. I will try to give you the basics and point you in the right direction of where to get it. Like always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to let me know here . To start, you need a bag to put all of your equipment. Many officials I have worked with use suitcases but that isn’t a requirement. Some officials use over the shoulder gym bags as well that work just fine. Whatever the bag, try to find one that has separate compartments to keep clothes and then accessories such as whistles and bean bags. Here is an example of one possibility, but any suitcase would work. Next, assuming you are not the referee, you will need a black hat with white stripes. Some of the white stripes are bigger than others. Most officials where hats that have thinner white lines, but for most high school and DIII college, it doesn’t make a huge difference.
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What you’re missing if you haven’t read Prepared Football Official’s early blog posts

If you are a new reader to Prepared Football Official’s blog, first welcome! I am glad you are here. Please take some time to read the About Me which can be found here and the Purpose page found here . You have also missed some early blog posts I posted. One of my favorite early blog posts was, “Why You Should Make the Leap and Start Officiating Football.” This post talks about many of the benefits that can come from you deciding to become an official. Some of the benefits range from communication and composure skills to test taking and teamwork. All things that can help you in all aspects of life. Take a look at this blog here . Another important early post was about one of the most important steps when becoming a football official, joining an area association. Being around other officials will not only help you learn the rules faster and better, but it will also help you get to know fellow officials so you can get some game assignments. Crews are eager to get some new blood out o
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