Has Minnesota Hockey created a fiefdom with the establishment of district referee coordinators and refs.  There have been several incidents that happened the 2012-2013 season that would led one to believe that is so.

The district referee coordinator start with a simple idea.  Each district has a district referee coordinator who is responsible for assigning referees to district games.  Once a district game has been scheduled, the refs show up, the game is played, and the team managers, coaches, etc are relieved of that burden or so they thought.

One can unblock a dam and get a river to flow, but you best be certain that there are not a bunch of busy beavers further down the river building another dam.

What has happened this past season is the district coordinators and refs are busy building another the dam which appears principally to benefit themselves by easing their workload.  Appears they have shifted the emphasis away from providing a service to youth hockey to trying to control youth hockey.  After all, as one coach pointed out, the refs are the only ones at a youth hockey game getting paid; yet they act as if they were doing the kids a favor by showing up at all.

Nobody argues that the refs control what happens on the ice, but what happens off the ice, should not be their concern.  They stopped getting paid as soon their skates hit the arena floor.

But the building of the fiefdom has resulted in the refs carrying authorities onto the ice that they don’t have and it is fostered by the presumed authority of the district coordinator.  The threat is simple, we will contact the district coordinator and he will get your team thrown out of Minnesota Hockey.  It never happens, but most coaches, parents, and association board members don’t challenge them.  The result is they acquiesce to their demands and alter actions that often are costly to the team, to the association and to the local arena managers.

One of the principle effects is commerce, something Minnesota Hockey (and its referee structure) has no right to do.  More than that, the refs have become more “arrogant” by reading into the referee structure power the authority do things they cannot do.

Again, the point being made is that the arrogance goes beyond making judgments on the ice.  It is triggering actions that are just plain dumb.

In one incident this past season, referees showed up as a game they were scheduled to ref as the game was ending.  They were an hour late.  With the cost of ice about $250 for that game plus the cost of one team to travel an hour to play the game, the coaches put their skates on and refereed the game.  They did not want to waste the money.  It was not a district game.  But the district coordinator is forcing the teams to use district referees for all youth games played inside their district.

Being forced to go through district coordinators is just wrong.  They are not a monopoly.  They have no fiefdom, they have no authority except threatening to kick the team out.  The district coordinator has only one set of authorities and it is a fragile one, the responsibility for district games only, not all youth games played at all the arenas in their district.  Arena managers and city administrators should be up in arms over the loss of revenue this creates.

But the incident gets worst, the refs despite being late made the threat to the coaches and parents to kick the teams out.  So the parents and coaches offered to pay them for missing the game.  It is our understanding the refs took the money and then reported the teams’ maleficence to the district coordinator.  Is there anything the refs did right in that scenario?  Is there any standard to justify that behavior?

It gets worst.

An association has an agreement with another association on sharing ice during prime hockey hours.  The agreement was hammered out legally.  The second association is in a different district than the first association.  The district the first association is affiliated with will not let them schedule district games on the second associations’ ice because it is outside the district.  With the intense pressure to drive costs of participation costs down, does this make any sense?  If district games could be scheduled on the second associations’ ice, travel distances would be shortened.  Instead they have to be scheduled at a more distant arena.  And the decision of the district coordinator ignores and denies what the first association has a legal right to exercise.  What authority gives the district coordinator that right?  Certainly, it is not any authority that Minnesota Hockey has.

It still gets worst or is “worser” a word.

Another district coordinator controlled an event by stipulating the conditions he would furnish referees.  The teams using the ice were from outside the district and it was insisted they use the district coordinator who then dictated the game format, schedule times, and other conditions.  The result is that the arena involved lost significant revenue because the teams were not allowed to fully ultilize the available ice.  In a tournament after that event, the district coordinator relaxed all the rules he had imposed on the teams.  By what authority, granted by Minnesota Hockey, did that district coordinator have?

There are more incidents that could be reported here.  YHH had only to ask the question at any arena and almost immediately would get more than one answer.  The final and worst incident happened on the ice, during a district game.  It was chosen because it demonstrates how a fiefdom works.  When refs see the power the district coordinator has through threats, then more and more refs are carrying arrogance on the ice.  This incident starts with the district coordinator stating that “a rule does not exist”, but the ref on the ice did not hear that.  So at a district game, he invokes the “rule that does not exist” and the coach who heard the district coordinator questions the call.

Is that wrong?  This ref thought so and proceeded to do the following late in the game.  A penalty had been called on the team the questioning coach was playing.  It was late in the game and that put the questioning coach’s team on the power play or so he thought.  The shorthanded team pulled their goalie for the faceoff and put six players on the ice (with the seventh serving a 2 minute minor in the penalty box).  The questioning coach questioned the ref on the six players and was glared into submission.  The six players played out the game.  Why did the ref think he could do that?  After the game, the ref wanted to confront the questioning coach during the handshake, but was kept away by a team’s assistant coach.  It had to be because he felt that through his district coordinator he had the power to re-write the rules.  By the way, his district coordinator was one of those mentioned previously.

The refs get paid.  In our floundering economy today, it is good money.  Unlike a few years ago, refs are no longer hard to find.  Minnesota Hockey has some soul searching to do this summer.  It starts with defining what authorities that district coordinators and refs have, not allowing the district coordinators and refs to think they have authorities that don’t exist.  If Minnesota Hockey does not, these problems will continue to grow.  With the advent of AAU hockey starting at the lower levels this season, teams soon may no longer care about the threat to be thrown out.