If you want to go quickly go alone, if you want to go far … hire a bunch of great umpires and referees.
At least we think that’s how the saying goes…
When you first start your sports league, and your small business, you might be able to do most everything.
Reffing, scheduling, registration, membership, customer service, photos … even supervising a league and throwing a cool party.
But once you start scaling your teams and your leagues, and running multiple leagues on multiple days – basically what we built League Lab for – you might find that you cant do it all anymore.
You need people, you need admins, you need supervisors, you need refs, and yes you need umpires.
You might decide to outsource this all to a referee association for Flag Football, or a umpire association for Softball, which could end up being a great move, but even so, you still will need to create your own staff for sports like Kickball and Dodgeball that typically don’t have an existing base of field staff to draw from.
So you will need to evaluate people, interview people, and hire people.
Like us, you will probably fall in love with new candidates who have tons of past reffing and umping experience, right until you realize that the experience is kind of a “mirage”- something we often refer to as a trap candidate – they said they did 25 games of softball, but they never actually called balls and strikes because there was a strike mat…. or they umped 3rd base…
…. or even worse – you might find that all of their experience is working against you. The high school football ref actually makes a bad flag football ref, because they have never experienced people walking up to them and asking them to explain a call. They are used to just dealing with players and coaches, who they could often just ignore, or shutdown.
Pro Tip: If you are running a co-ed flag football league, with people who are often playing the sport for the first time, you do not want referees who ignore your players. Thanks for coming to our TED talk.
But these are high level ideas … trap candidates, and bad culture fit candidates. We can teach you about these ideas some other time, but lets start with a few small filters that will likely crop up before you even talk to a candidate at length for the first time.
Hiring for a rec sports league is not a matter of getting all the answers. Hiring refs and umps is a matter of starting with a large pool and filtering out as many people as possible who might be good officials, but should never referee or umpire a game for you and your sports league.
These ideas have nothing to do with penalties, rules, and protocols, and everything to do with your candidate filter and your ability to evaluate total strangers.
We want candidates that are confident, proactive, and good communicators.
Then later, we can talk about rules and situations.
So you should start thinking very early on about filters you can use to assess whether you should even spend time talking about your rules with a new candidate.
Here are a few big filters that we’ve noticed over the years:
1) Cant Make the Meet
Life is complicated. Things happen.
You set up a meeting with a new candidate, whether it be on the phone or in person, and something happens.
Maybe its a serious issue, maybe its a family problem, maybe their car got a flat tire. Who knows.
These things do happen. They probably don’t happen quite as much as people SAY that they happen, but they definitely happen.
The thing we are most interested in is how does the candidate handle missing the meeting?
Do they call you panicky, 5 minutes before the scheduled time, making a vague statement about “something that came up” and saying they can’t make it … while simultaneously not even mentioning the idea of a re-schedule?
Or do they call you hours, or even days, before your meeting, explain what happened, and propose two new times?
Guess which candidate still has a chance, and which one you should probably stay away from ?
Even more, when someone bails on an interview or meeting, we put the pressure on them to call us back if they want another chance. Again … we want candidates that are proactive. If you have to bail on a meeting, then its on you to call us back with another time … 90% of people don’t … which is fine.
Maybe they can make the meet, but they are just late.
This is an interesting one.
Some organizations swear that no one can ever be late. You are done. Obviously someone showing up late to a basketball or soccer or kickball shift is bad, because everyone stands around and is waiting on the official.
But being late happens. It happens a lot.
If someone is late, we care much more about the way they handle the situation, then how late they were.
If someone calls us 20 minutes before a meeting and lets us know they will be 10 minutes late, well … that’s actually GOOD. This person is demonstrating to you that they are proactive and a good communicator. If this happens every time they are scheduled for something … well you probably don’t need our help with that. But if it happens on the first meet and they are letting you know ahead of time they are going to be late, or even MIGHT be late, that’s normally a person we want.
It’s the second person, the person that just shows up 10 minutes late, and mumbles a quick “sorry, couldn’t find parking” or even worse “sorry, traffic was really bad” … that’s a person we are already starting to filter out. Sure we can still have the meeting, but you already have a big red flag, and you will have to do A LOT to overcome that.
2) Get IN-to the office
I’ve been fortunate enough to visit quite a few offices of big sports leagues. Hopefully they wouldn’t be too offended to say that this is not exactly prime real estate … and it doesn’t need to be. The office is normally the court or the field. You might have an out of the way office, with a weird entrance, because a sports league normally does not need a lot of walk in customers like a coffee shop or a bagel store.
We have an office tucked away on the lower level of a weird office complex in Seattle. Its a bit tricky to find if you’ve never been there. Which way do you turn, which spot do you park, which door do you go in….
Luckily, because we aren’t total jerks, we made a video that has fairly detailed instructions on all of this, where to park, where to enter, and we have a brand new huge sign with big letters right above our front door, so if you make it to the parking lot its kind of hard to miss…..
And yet …
We constantly have people getting lost, calling us from the upper part of the parking lot, and walking in the wrong door.
<We are suite 110 with a big sign behind the door made of glass, but many people walk in door 108 which has no signs and doesn’t really look like an entrance …>
The issue is not how nice our doors look, the issue is THEY REFUSED TO WATCH THE VIDEO !!
They didn’t follow the directions and the material we gave them.
If they can’t follow the instructions on how to get in the front door of our office, and where to park, how in the heck can you expect them to follow the instructions of your rulebook, or how to set up a field, or how to deal with a supervisor report, or an injury?
Getting to our office, and inside our office is a bit tricky, but its really not a big deal unless you refuse to pay attention to the tools and info we give you.
If you just type in our address into Waze or Apple Maps … well 50/50 you will end up on a different level of the parking lot late for your meeting, panicking and calling us with some version of “I think I’m in the right spot but …. ”
Even so, our big new sign? Come on brah … pay attention and open your eyes. If you cant see a giant new sign above our front door, how are you gonna see a close play at first base ?!?
If you skip watching the video on how to get to our office, how do we know you are going to pay attention to any other educational video we ask you to watch ?
3) Stand and Wait
Hopefully you are lucky enough to even have an office. For a long time we did not, so we would literally interview refs and umps in coffee shops and bars … welcome to small business !! Even if you have an office, you might not have a clear front desk or a receptionist. We certainly do not.
We have a ton of signage in the front of our office, but there is nobody sitting up front … most of our people sit in the back.
So often times people will walk in the front door, look around, and then keep walking into the back of the office until they find a person.
And …
Sometimes a new candidate will just walk in the office and just stand at the front … and wait … and wait … and wait some more.
We won’t come get you. You need to come find us. Is that rude?
Maybe… but it is another filter.
If you have an interview at 2PM – and its 2:03 PM and you are still standing next to the front door and you are too nervous to walk back and ask someone for help … well … you probably aren’t going to be proactive and confident enough to be a good referee or umpire.
Even more – we will have a new candidate watch an intro video in the front of the office – again, more of that video watching stuff we talked about!
The video lasts about 7 minutes.
Most people will get up after the video and walk into the conference room, or at least find someone and say “I’m done.”
And some people … you guessed it …
… will just sit at the table for minutes after the video is over staring at a blank screen and waiting for someone to come grab them, like they are waiting to get called in at a doctors office.
These ideas are never an auto-fail, everyone always gets a shot. We are never total jerks and send someone home when they cant find the front door, or just stand at the entrance for 5 minutes.
But you probably can guess how most of these interviews go once they finally get started … no matter how long they stand or sit around.
So with these ideas in mind, you can see how valuable it is to see how people react in real life and in real time to the basic bulding blocks of your cadidate process. How do they communicate when they are running late? How do they follow directions? How do they find the front door?
So then comes the trap.
Online Interviews.
Don’t get us wrong. Zoom is awesome. Teams/ Zoom/ online video conferencing … it saves so much travel time and wasted time.
If you want to do a phone screen over zoom instead? No Problem –
But if you use zoom to totally avoid meeting a candidate in person, and you can never see if they miss the front door, or stand in the entrance for ten minutes … well … you’ve just prolonged that unfortunate discovery about a lack of confidence, or communication or proactivity for a later moment when they will likely do more damage to your league and your small business.
So keep these filters in mind when you start scaling up and hiring more refs, umps and supervisors. We believe you want to see people live and in person, before you ask all kinds of cool or silly interview questions. See if they pass the initial filters your sports league decides on, so you know they are worth investing future time in for the eventual experiences with your players and captains.