Referees--Permission?

I would like to express my feelings on one aspect of the recent decisions by the Executive Council, the one forcing APF referees to ask permission to referee in another federation. I think this is a bad idea.

For the past two or three years, we’ve had a real problem getting APF-certified referees to do our meets here in California. One reason is that there aren’t many of them. We’ve been working to correct that and now have a small pool from which to select. But on at least two occasions we had to host a non-sanctioned meet because we couldn’t get three APF referees; either someone cancelled out on us or we couldn’t get three from the get-go.

While the EC’s heart seems to be in the right place, practically, it’s going to be a real pain in the butt. I think we are going to lose some refs. What are you going to do about someone like Gordon Santee who referees in many feds? Once or twice a year Gordon will do an APF meet in California (Mendy’s FitExpo meet and perhaps one other if he’s available). Are you now expecting Gordon to ask permission from the APF to go and referee the ten or so other meets that he does a year? The same with Kevin Meskew. Kevin has done mostly USPF in the past and he will continue to do that. These two guys are great mentors for our new APF refs out here. We NEED them. To those two, you could add Ken and Lisa Wheeler. They work mostly with the USPF in California. Now, you’re going to have two members of the EC asking permission to do USPF meets (which they often do here in the state). It would be a shame to lose all of these refs because of some silly requirement to “ask permission” to do other feds’ meets. What’s going to happen next? Is the USPF now going to require that THEIR refs ask permission to do OUR meets? In that case, the referees may just decide to heck with it. This slippery slope is going to do nothing but cause trouble for us out here California, trouble that we don't really need.

I've been an APF referee for over two years now. I have no intention of going to another fed. But others lift and ref across multiple feds. That's fine. I don't really see anything wrong with that. They do it for the love of sport. Powerlifting is such a small, cult sport to begin with, why create referee problems when none existed in the first place?

Steve--Agreed, Eric Stone.