Now the season is underway, we thought it would be a good time to ask for your help by asking you to use MCFOA’s on-line crew evaluating facility as regularly as you can.

Actually, the MCFOA web site, www.mcoafootball.org, offers several opportunities to evaluate crews. There you will find links to Evaluate a Crew, File a Varsity Game Report and File a Sub-Varsity Game Report. All these are located at the lower left of the main page on the site. Of these three links, only the first, Evaluate a Crew, is designed for use by anyone other than an MCFOA crew member or assigned evaluator. Each of the “Game Report” links is designed for use by a crew member to detail important aspects of the game, report attendance and rate other members of the crew. Occasionally we even assign a highly experienced official who is otherwise “off duty” to evaluate a crew for us. For these two links, we require reporting by our crew chiefs and we encourage other crew members to file their own reports of any games in which they participate. We use these “internal” reports to help us rank officials by position as well as to evaluate overall management of games. We share excerpted comments on performance with our Position Representatives who, in turn, work with those who have been evaluated to either reinforce good performance or to address specific problems noted by the evaluating crew chief, crew member or assigned MCFOA evaluator.

However, for the Newsletter our focus is on the Evaluate a Crew link. This is the place where we solicit input from anyone else outside our organization who has a comment about the game, the crew or anything else pertinent to the game. Primarily, we are hoping to receive input from you, the coaches, via the Evaluate a Crew link. While we do pay attention to any and all inputs we receive via this on-line form, our job is to serve the contesting teams. We believe that input received from the coaching staff is generally the most useful since it is your games we are calling and you have a professional’s eye toward how the game is managed and called by our crew.

In much the same way as we use input from our own members in the other two game report formats, we also use your input. We have designated highly experienced officials as Position Representatives to work with our game officials to either reinforce good performance or to address specific problems that you notice. We share your inputs on a position-by-position basis with our Position Representatives. This is an important part of how we use what you send us. Perhaps even more important than dealing with individual performances, we use your input to gauge how the entire crew did for you and your opponent in the game that you are evaluating. We know there is no such thing as a “perfectly officiated” game. Nevertheless, we strive for perfection both as individuals and as a crew. In a crew that is functioning well, most individual imperfections will be very hard to detect because the action of the crew as a whole will mask small imperfections any one official may display. Nothing is 100%, though. Of course we want to hear about games where you felt the officiating was outstanding. We love to be able to give well-earned praise to individuals and entire crews. More importantly, though, we need to give effective negative feedback, as well as a way to move in a positive direction to improve, whenever below-standard performance is involved. We feel it is much more important that we continue to improve than it is to simply pat ourselves on the back. This is where the Evaluate a Crew link bears its most important fruit. As a result, we especially want to hear from you if you feel you received a sub-standard performance from a crew or even one individual on a crew.

On the form, itself, there are basically 3 areas for input. Within these areas some information is required and other input is optional. Required input areas are labeled in a bold typeface. The first area, toward the top, is where we ask for your identification and identification of the game. We don’t need you to provide much in the way of personal details here. We are only trying to qualify who filed the evaluation and then be able to match the evaluation to a specific crew. In the second section, we ask you to provide an evaluation of the crew as a whole and as many of the individual members whose performance you were able to evaluate. This is formatted input that helps us “standardize” inputs from many different people across many different games. Please give us evaluations on as many of the folks on our crew as you feel you got a good “read” on. In the final section, we’re just looking for free-form input. We feel this is actually the most important part of the form; this is the exact text from the form that applies:

                 “Please add comments, below. Your comments help us understand your scores. Please tell us more about any "Needs Improvement" or "Poor" rating you made, above. Let us know of any outstanding action or impression, either good or bad, taken or made by this crew. Tell us anything else about this crew that you feel MCFOA should address in any way. Finally, if you would like a call back to discuss this further, please give us your 10-digit phone number and a time you would prefer to receive a call from an MCFOA Board Member.”

This free-form input really is the key to our understanding your evaluation. And we’re quite serious about contacting you back if you’d like to talk to us about your evaluation. We will NOT call you back unless you leave us a number, though. We know you’re busy and that you’ve already spent time by filling out the form. We appreciate that, aplenty. We don’t want to be pestering you for anything else. But if you DO want to talk, so do we. Just leave us a number where we can reach you, and we’ll make every effort to get back in touch with you as quickly as we can.

In regard to how our process of handling your input goes, an e-mail notification of the entry of a crew evaluation is sent with each entry almost instantaneously from the time you click on the “Submit” button at the bottom of the form. This notification is sent to a member of our board who performs a clearinghouse-type review of the form. Depending on the content, he will either forward the entire form, intact, to other board members, as appropriate, or he will excerpt the pertinent pieces of the report to pass on to all Position Representatives who had members evaluated by you. In the case where you request a call, he will see to it that the appropriate board member is contacted to make that call back to you. From start to finish this process can take anywhere from as little as a day to as long as a week. Generally, it should take somewhere in between. We do try as hard as we can to process these evaluations quickly, though. Our general membership meetings are held on Monday evenings both before and throughout in-season play. We make every effort to deal with Crew Evaluations received by mid-day on Sunday for the previous week’s Varsity and Sub-Varsity games in time to review them with the crew members during the positional meetings held as part of most Monday general membership meetings or in one-on-one meetings held in conjunction with the general membership meetings.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this series of MCFOA Newsletters. This is the last one we currently plan to send out until the regular season has ended. Of course if we detect something we need to get out to our contracted schools on an “emergency” basis during the season, we could decide to put out one or more “extra” Newsletters before season’s end. Hopefully, that won’t be necessary. Good luck for the season. We hope we will be able to hear from you often throughout the year via your crew evaluations. We’ll do our best to put them to good use as we continue to serve our contracted schools and the teams they play.