Things are rather peaceful around the tennis officiating world these days. The ITA season is nearly done and the summer schedule is about to begin so be prepared with the parents who take their kids to tons of tournaments.
We still have the Men's Junior College Nationals in Plano on May 11-15, and then the NCAA Regionals and NCAA Tournament ahead of us so there is still a lot of good college tennis. Since the NCAA's are being held in College Station, hopefully many of you will be able to attend. It is doubtful that any Texas officials will get to work the NCAA's since that is a very "closed membership group."
There are a few ripples still in our officiating pond. Seems that there is some jockeying for officials for the NCAA regionals since Texas has three regionals within 100 miles of each other. Hopefully, all coordinators will be nice and not try to steal someone else's members... Preachers do it all the time but it doesn't make it right.
Another disturbing little ripple surfaced recently when a friend of mine was told that a grievance had been filed against him and was being studied by the Texas Section Grievance Committee. My friend knew nothing of this and it came as a complete surprise. If all of this is true, then it is not right nor the proper procedure to follow.
If someone ( either player, parent, tournament, or official) has a grievance filed against them and it makes it to the Grievance Committee then that person should IMMEDIATELY receive a copy of the grievance and be allowed to respond to the said grievance. I have already been through this process during this past year and it was extremely difficult to get the Texas Section Chairman, Bruce Sampley, to even let me see a copy of the grievance. He only did so after my sending letters to the National Chair of Officials and threatening a lawsuit.
Folks, these things ought not to be this way... An official should have the right to know all facts of a grievance (immediately if not sooner) and then be allowed to respond to them quickly. It would stop a lot of endless and needless speculation about grievances.
3 comments:
"AMEN"
Nobody's trying to "steal" anyone's officials. The problem is with one so-called chief, "Fred", I believe his name is, who won't release people he no longer needs, so they are available to work in other places. It's called not playing and not sharing.
Maybe the word "steal" was a bit harsh. Perhaps I should have said "hijack."
When people are signed up and committed to work somewhere then they should be considered "off limits" to anyone else.
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