Received from the MN SRC today: US Soccer has made the decision to roll all 2020 certification through the entirety of the 2021 calendar year. This means your paid certification will now be effective through the rest of 2020 AND all of 2021.
Cool. I’ll take the bonus time. I’m going to have to run the fitness test again regardless, but at least I won’t have to worry about the new registration system or find matches for assessments. Although, for my state that’s a non-issue. I wonder how the states are going to do with that loss of income tho....
So, I ultimately turned out to be right (aside from the whole "RR is the grade instead of numbers" aspect)? It just took two months for USSF to realize it had no choice. https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/2021-ussf-grade-maintenance.2109689/
So do you get a new badge that says 2021 on it, or does everyone just wear the 2020 badge for 2 years?
If you black out half of the 0, it looks a lot like a 1. Just remember to keep moving so it'll be blurry anyway.
Correction: US Soccer has offered states the option of doing this. It is not coming from US Soccer. It is up to each SRC whether or not to implement this. For most SRCs, the question is can they deal with the decreased income from no registration fees from re-registering refs and still offer their programming?
I can think of several things SRCs use annual fees for. Covering the costs of rooms for State or Presidents cup. Sending younger referees to US Regionals or to Regional ODP camps for development. Covering costs for referee coaches or mentors at local ODP events. In our region we have youth scholarships. Even little things like IT support to host and maintain websites. There are many things that they may have to cut back on.
my state does webinars. And we also have a good amount of registered officials. They had a surplus a couple years back and did statewide in-services where they catered food and gave us some pretty cool stuff. As well as have people from herb Silva, esse baharmast, Farhad mansourian, bob Evans, Rick eddy, etc etc come in and do clinics. Really cool.
YMMV? Definitely. The number of registrations makes a big difference. Just about any state with more than 1,000 registrations has paid staff to handle all of the stuff. That may be part time but you cannot rely on volunteers. the amount of work is such that you'll burn out your volunteers in a year. Some small states virtually operate out of the back of the SRA's SUV. Some big states have a full time paid SRA. The USSF registration fee is split 50-50 between Chicago and the state referee committee. Some states charge an additional fee because they have decided that the program requires more than the USSF fee provides. Training takes time and effort, both for clinics and mentoring. Some states subsidize upgrade assessments because they want to encourage referees to upgrade. Some states charge fees for entry level classes that exceed their out of pocket costs, to cover office staff, websites, credit card processing fees, etc. And the quality of management at the SRC level varies a lot. Just because someone was (or is) a national referee, a former MLS referee, etc., doesn't mean that they can manage their way out of a paper bag. (And, no, I'm not pointing in the direction of any specific SRAs.) And if a SRC didn't have reserves, they're going to have a hard time getting through the next two years.
There's states with only a 1000 registrations? I'm thinking of Alaska and Wyoming... but I figured at least 2500 - 5000 officials.
Oh, yeah. I happen to have the 2007 figures sitting right here. (Yeah, I've got a lot of paper on my desk.) There were 20 states with less than 1,000 referees. Lowest on the list is North Dakota at 206. The largest was Cal North at 12,082. There were 135,708 registered referees that year and I don't think there's been any significant increase since then.