Education

So how can you add a sports officiating class to your list of course offerings if the budget is tight and options are limited? After working with more than 1,500 educational organizations across the country and beyond, we’ve learned a few places schools can look for support.

In collaboration with our partners at Sports Officials Care and our friends at Major League Baseball, as a part of ESPN’s “Take Back Sports” initiative, Jim Joyce, longtime MLB umpire, shares how chasing perfection in officiating can lead to frustration, and how accountability and credibility can lead sports officials through tough situations.

A checklist is used to ensure that steps in a process are completed accurately, consistently, and in the correct sequence. We use them all the time in our daily life, whether we’re completing tasks at work, fixing something at home, or compiling information for a report. It makes sense, then, that we would use checklists regularly as part of officiating, both on and off the field.

Whether you’ve been familiar with us for a while, or you’ve only recently heard about us, we want to take a moment to tell you about how we got here, what you’ll see in this space, and what we hope this blog will do for you and the world of sports officiating.

We interviewed respected educator Brennan Torgerson, who recently retired from his role as the business teacher from Buhler High School in Kansas. His long career spans 35 years of high school teaching, with 20 years spent at Buhler. In his retirement, he remains active, continuing his role as the Career and Technical Education (CTE) Coordinator and coaching boys and girls golf at Buhler, plus teaching an online class for Hutchinson Community College. Brennan's passion for st