form-goals

Seasonal goals, expectations, and vision are necessary for officials to improve. The first several years, officials are busy learning the basics. Afterwards, it is up to the official to define their career and path forward.

Do you want to work a state championship game, become a varsity referee and crew chief, or learn a new position. Maybe you want to focus on improving communication, sideline management, rules knowledge, or philosophy. Whatever the goal, we want to help you.

Achievable

Goals need to be achievable. Write goals that are achievable and challenging at the same time. Grand goals are not easy to achieve directly, they require smaller intermediary goals. If you want to work a state championship game, you probably need to set a series of smaller manageable goals to accomplish that.

Believable

Goals need to be believable. Each goal will help get you to your big picture goals, so you need to believe they are within your effort to accomplish.

Committed

You need to commit yourself if you want to reach your goals. Act on a daily basis, act on a weekly basis, and act on a game to game basis.

Current Situation

This is about where you’re at right now. How many years of experience do you have? What are you good at, and where do you want to improve. Review feedback you received from past observations, those will have good starting points to review. Your current situation influences your specific development goals.

Create goals with specific, observable, and measurable outcomes.

Setting general goals such as “improving rules knowledge” is easy to state but it is too broad because it would be difficult to track and measure. A measurable goal is one you can quantify in the sense that you’re able to know how close you are to accomplishing your goal.

• Specific: Instead of “improving rules knowledge” we could be more specific “improve understanding and recall of the definitions in rule 2.”

• Measurable: We want to set a timeline, so we can track and determine progress, “improve understanding and recall of rule 2 over in two weeks”

• Observable/Action Items: Finally, we need to add action items to help drive our goal. For improving rule 2 knowledge we could split the definitions in to groups of 15 and study them over several days or split them in sets of 5 and study them over 9 days. This way we defined a set of action items to accomplish our goal that are also observable.

• Example Goal: Improve understanding and recall of rule 2 over two weeks by splitting the definitions into groups of 15 for daily review.

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