New Referee changes starting 2017-2018

Our membership took the time to attend our 2017 AGM and voiced their concerns on some refereeing issues. We are happy to report that your executive listened. We have spent the last few weeks in meetings discussing and investigating how we can make the quality of our league and its officials even better than ever.

A committee was set up with this task. The committee interviewed four different referee’s association including Andy Bushey and his team. We also took the time to meet with other associations to get their input on how they felt about the referees that we were looking at.

We are pleased to report that we have made the following drastic changes that will make SCOHA one of the best Men’s hockey leagues in Hamilton:

We are designating a member of the board to become the Referee Liaison. He will work with the Referee in Chief to maintain our guidelines.

• We will follow new SCOHA Guidelines for the scheduling of referees that will insure no team sees a referee two weeks in a row or more than twice a month (with the exception of unusual circumstances). The referee stable will be 
  increased to allow this to happen and a clear plan is in place to do so. 
• SCOHA players are no longer allowed to referee in the league.
• The Referee’s Liaison and each Team’s captain will receive a monthly referee 
  schedule. The captains will have No input on the schedule but they will be able 
  to see that there is proper rotation of referees and pass this information on to 
  his team if need be.
• Referees will be evaluated on an ongoing basis by the Referee in chief and the 
  Referee Liaison to maintain our associations standards set out by the executive

In the end Andy Bushey has put forth a clear plan that will follow the guidelines that we have put in place to our satisfaction. Andy has been a respected member of SCOHA for many years and deserves the chance to address this complaint and he has our confidence. We trust that everyone will be satisfied with the changes but in the unlikely event that further change is needed we do have a clear path forward. 

We look forward to our best season yet and we appreciate your patience as we took the
time that it deserved to make this right.

Best Regards,
SCOHA Executive