Saturday, May 02, 2009

The Joys & Perplexing Nature of the NCAA

The greatest joy I experience in my tennis life is officiating ITA/NCAA tennis matches--but in all my years of working with them I have yet to fully understand the NCAA and how they do things. And this year further heightens my amazement and frustration...

I have yet to understand how they can send Baylor to Tulsa and Mississippi to LSU while Texas and Texas A&M are hosting. Sounds way too political to me! They love to say they don't want some of the teams to travel too far but they are sending teams to Austin and College Station that are traveling thousands of miles.

About the time I think I can vaguely understand this process, I start thinking about the officiating crew they will have at the NCAA championships in College Station. There are no Texas officials invited to work and the ones they do have come with very little (and sometimes none) ITA chair experience.

Go figure that one out...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Right on: The NCAA has their own close nit group and they will not use any local officials, [some are so much better than the ones they have in their enclosed group] that
local or in state officials have no chance of every working. If you are not a "BRIDGE" player forget about ever being selected. I've personally saw how they bring their own group into the area and even with the recommendation from host University, it does no good. Some of their officials are so lousy doing a chair it's embarrassing to be classified in the same arena with them.
When the "LORD" passing out the rewards, we'll see how far back in line they are compared to the true
and honest officials.

When anyone every figures out the NCAA please let everyone know.

Anonymous said...

Selecting NCAA officials is like Cheryl Jones selecting her pups to work BIG XII matches. If you are not one of the NCAA PUP'S heaven forbid that you will ever get the chance to work an NCAA Tournament.

Just Like working BIG XII. Just look at the number of officials that Cheryl Jones select to work out of state matches compared to the number of out of state officials that works in the state of TEXAS.