Post by FredFan7 on Jan 21, 2013 23:54:47 GMT -5
Article from Referee Magazine. I think the NHL has a really nice plan to have their officials retire. Do you think other professional leagues should do the same thing with their officials?
The NHL has developed a succession program that allows veteran officials a “victory lap” at the close of their careers.
By Van Oler
A veteran official drives home after a game, idly wondering how long his knees will ache, asking out loud if it’s time to think about retirement. That perhaps is a tougher decision to make than any split-second decision he will have during any game on the ice.
It’s Terry Gregson’s job to initiate that conversation with the NHL’s on-ice officials, and he does his work knowing not everyone will welcome the discussion. Because of the skating required, it gets late early for NHL referees and linesmen and the subject of retirement comes up at a younger age than it does for officials in the other major sports.
“Terry is pretty much the perfect guy to orchestrate succession planning,” said Kerry Fraser, a 30-year NHL referee who retired in April. “He is considerate and thoughtful. He was here when there wasn’t succession planning and if the league didn’t want you, they’d find a way to get rid of you. That was demoralizing; when someone has given their adult life to any company, there has to be a better way to move on.”
The NHL’s senior vice president and director of officiating was himself one of the league’s outstanding officials. In his 25 years in the league, Gregson called more than 1,500 regular-season and playoff games and was assigned to work the Stanley Cup Finals eight different times. There were quite a few years when his offseason consisted of the months of July and August. Thus, Gregson has a thorough knowledge of the influence officiating has over every aspect of one’s life.
Officiating as a profession includes the travel inherent to all professional sports, but with an extra “degree of difficulty.” The basic load of assignments for an on-ice official during the regular season is 73 games. For referees and linesmen, every game is a road game which requires constant negotiation of the commercial air travel labyrinth. The NHL has the largest geographic footprint of all of the professional sports leagues, with rinks in cities from Sunrise, Fla., to Vancouver, British Columbia. When Gregson first became an NHL referee in 1979 the mandatory retirement age in the collective bargaining agreement was 45, but improvements in travel and working conditions along with additional attention to nutrition and offseason conditioning have resulted in an officiating workforce that stays healthier longer.
“With the introduction of the four-man system (the NHL added a second on-ice referee in the 2005 season) we have started to get people past 50 in the league,” said Gregson. “However, everybody is different. In our situation, skating is a very important part of our job, and there is definitely a diminution of that skill over time.”
The skating required of an NHL referee combined with the number of games make it perhaps the most physically demanding of all professional officiating challenges.
A typical assignment sequence for an NHL official can include six games in 11 days and 6,500 miles of travel. No one’s complaining; it’s a known requirement of the profession and some undoubtedly see it as a fringe benefit rather than some kind of burden. However, it does substantiate Gregson’s belief that retirement from officiating produces a lifestyle change as profound as any the official will deal with in his entire life. That change impacts family members as well, which is one reason Gregson, with the official’s concurrence, will incorporate spouses into the departure discussion.
“Sometimes a spouse can have a more realistic timeline in mind than the official does,” he said.
“When I first sat down with Terry, my wife was present,” explained Dan Marouelli, who retired in April after 28 seasons as an NHL referee. “She was definitely going to be an important part of the succession plan because she had been an important part of my career.”
Spouses see things other people don’t. Recovering from a road trip, which once required nothing more than a good night’s sleep, now requires two full days and all the ice the refrigerator can manufacture for application to the knees and other sore joints. That empirical knowledge can, over time, help the official perform an objective self-assessment which can in turn establish what Gregson calls the “common ground” necessary to help the league and the referee develop a departure schedule which will allow the person to “leave with dignity.”
Terms like “common ground” and “dignity” are fading quickly from the vocabularies of American employers, but that is a function of workplace mobility as much as it is management callousness. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports people between 18 and 42 (the age range which many of the league’s referees and linesmen occupy) have an average of 10 jobs during those years. NHL officials, unlike most American workers, spend multiple decades working for the same organization. When a referee or linesman retires it is now, thanks in large part to Gregson, formally acknowledged for a reason that is as quaint as it is noble — an appreciation of the official’s service to the league over the years.
While the league would certainly prefer to negotiate a departure plan that an active official will find satisfactory, Gregson’s primary responsibility is to make sure every member of the league’s officiating staff is able to perform at the levels required. As a result, if there is a wide divergence between the amount of time the league believes an official has left and the opinion of the official, it’s Gregson’s job to narrow the gap as tactfully as possible. As is the case with most employer-employee discussions, the opinion of the employer will prevail, but at least there is an element of empathy present in what could be a contentious series of conversations.
“At the end of the day, it is their puck,” said Marouelli. “You can either take advantage of the opportunity to plan your own departure or you can fight it. I’ve seen too many people leave our business angry and bitter.”
The magnitude of an official’s final departure from the profession is what prompted Gregson to develop a program that gives each official a chance to control or at least influence when and how it happens. The program was first implemented under Stephen Walkom’s reign as senior vice president and director of NHL officials. Walkom returned to the ice as a referee for the 2009-10 season.
The first step in the program is to negotiate a departure timeline which will make it possible to allow the official to choose his own retirement date.
“Veteran officials in good standing will always know when their last year of employment will be before the season starts,” Gregson said. “It’s almost like a victory lap.”
The idea of the “victory lap” met resistance when first proposed from some who felt an official in his final season wouldn’t bring the proper care and professionalism to his duties, a concern to which Gregson had a ready reply.
“I know the psyche of an official,” he said. “You do care, and you care until your last call.”
The final year, when negotiated through the succession program, can be enjoyable and memorable for the official. The league accommodated Marouelli’s request to work the NHL’s opening weekend in Helsinki, Finland, and linesman Lyle Seitz received an assignment to the outdoor Winter Classic played on New Year’s Day at Fenway Park.
Other requests have been less ambitious and more practical, like back-to-back games in Tampa and Sunrise, Fla., to allow a retiring official to bring his wife along for a midseason Florida vacation.
Every official gets to choose the rink in which he’ll call his final regular-season game. Linesman Mark Paré received scoreboard recognition at the United Center in Chicago during his farewell contest between the Blackhawks and the Red Wings, while Fraser worked his final game in Philadelphia, just a short trip from his New Jersey home. He received a crowd response that was far more friendly than that given to most of the city’s beleaguered athletes.
One thing the league will not guarantee for departing officials is a playoff assignment. Although it can certainly be requested, “working playoffs is non-negotiable,” said Gregson. “Those assignments are based on evaluations and performance during the regular season. Officials in their final season will get playoff assignments if they meet the standards, but that is not an item we would negotiate.”
While the conversations between Gregson and the officials may begin as informal chats, there are labor rules which govern relations between the league, represented initially by Gregson, and the National Hockey League Officials Association (NHLOA), the group representing the league’s referees and linesmen. An individual official’s succession plan does, in fact, become a written agreement binding on both the person and the league. What started as a professional courtesy designed by one former official to assist peers with their inevitable retirements has become league policy, codified in the current collective bargaining agreement (CBA), which was ratified in 2006. As the CBA itself says:
“The league may approach any official at any time, with confidential notice to the executive director of the NHLOA, to discuss career/succession planning issues and/or to plan a binding schedule for the official’s retirement.”
With the concept of the succession plan codified in the CBA, NHL officials have the opportunity to manage the final years of their careers. Previously, retirements were handled with less formality.
“As long as it’s not forced upon the official, it’s a no-brainer,” explains Fraser. “Ultimately the employer holds the cards. They obviously have to plan for their staffing requirements. If the employer feels the official or the player isn’t good enough anymore or they don’t want him on the team anymore, they’ll find a way to make the change, whether the player or official agrees to it or not.”
Gregson’s interest in developing the succession program was prompted by his own experiences. He approached the league with his own plan, seeking to retire upon reaching 25 years in the league at the age of 50.
“I knew the end was coming, but I didn’t really have a chance to talk about it,” he explained. “I believe when you get guys talking about it, (retirement) becomes more of a reality to them. Some guys don’t really want to talk, and then you have to explain the old-fashioned way (of retiring officials) wasn’t much fun for anybody. We’ve got allies now; eight people have gone through the succession program, and to be honest some are probably happier about it than others, but generally it has been a very good experience.”
Other officiating associations at the professional and amateur levels can apply some of the league’s “best practices” for the benefit of their own members, like the NHL has done.
• Establishing a standard retirement age is both unnecessary and discriminatory.
• Providing accommodations in scheduling as long as they don’t compromise the quality of officiating. Perhaps a departing official can in his final season get games that don’t require a 125-mile drive each way.
• An official may request an opportunity to work with an old friend a number of times during that last season or mentor a newer official.
To be successful, sports officials must have a thick skin and the ability to suppress emotion while an effective transition program must be rooted in compassion. As a result, the traits necessary to be a good referee seem to conflict with the characteristics required to create a dignified succession plan for one’s colleagues and peers. However ambitious it may become, an effective transition program starts with the responsible individual asking a simple question: How would I like to be treated as I consider retirement?
“That final year arrives much quicker than you think it will,” notes Gregson. “That last game is a very difficult one to do because once you leave the ice as an NHL referee your professional officiating days are over.”
Van Oler is a freelance writer and hockey official from Cincinnati.
The NHL has developed a succession program that allows veteran officials a “victory lap” at the close of their careers.
By Van Oler
A veteran official drives home after a game, idly wondering how long his knees will ache, asking out loud if it’s time to think about retirement. That perhaps is a tougher decision to make than any split-second decision he will have during any game on the ice.
It’s Terry Gregson’s job to initiate that conversation with the NHL’s on-ice officials, and he does his work knowing not everyone will welcome the discussion. Because of the skating required, it gets late early for NHL referees and linesmen and the subject of retirement comes up at a younger age than it does for officials in the other major sports.
“Terry is pretty much the perfect guy to orchestrate succession planning,” said Kerry Fraser, a 30-year NHL referee who retired in April. “He is considerate and thoughtful. He was here when there wasn’t succession planning and if the league didn’t want you, they’d find a way to get rid of you. That was demoralizing; when someone has given their adult life to any company, there has to be a better way to move on.”
The NHL’s senior vice president and director of officiating was himself one of the league’s outstanding officials. In his 25 years in the league, Gregson called more than 1,500 regular-season and playoff games and was assigned to work the Stanley Cup Finals eight different times. There were quite a few years when his offseason consisted of the months of July and August. Thus, Gregson has a thorough knowledge of the influence officiating has over every aspect of one’s life.
Officiating as a profession includes the travel inherent to all professional sports, but with an extra “degree of difficulty.” The basic load of assignments for an on-ice official during the regular season is 73 games. For referees and linesmen, every game is a road game which requires constant negotiation of the commercial air travel labyrinth. The NHL has the largest geographic footprint of all of the professional sports leagues, with rinks in cities from Sunrise, Fla., to Vancouver, British Columbia. When Gregson first became an NHL referee in 1979 the mandatory retirement age in the collective bargaining agreement was 45, but improvements in travel and working conditions along with additional attention to nutrition and offseason conditioning have resulted in an officiating workforce that stays healthier longer.
“With the introduction of the four-man system (the NHL added a second on-ice referee in the 2005 season) we have started to get people past 50 in the league,” said Gregson. “However, everybody is different. In our situation, skating is a very important part of our job, and there is definitely a diminution of that skill over time.”
The skating required of an NHL referee combined with the number of games make it perhaps the most physically demanding of all professional officiating challenges.
A typical assignment sequence for an NHL official can include six games in 11 days and 6,500 miles of travel. No one’s complaining; it’s a known requirement of the profession and some undoubtedly see it as a fringe benefit rather than some kind of burden. However, it does substantiate Gregson’s belief that retirement from officiating produces a lifestyle change as profound as any the official will deal with in his entire life. That change impacts family members as well, which is one reason Gregson, with the official’s concurrence, will incorporate spouses into the departure discussion.
“Sometimes a spouse can have a more realistic timeline in mind than the official does,” he said.
“When I first sat down with Terry, my wife was present,” explained Dan Marouelli, who retired in April after 28 seasons as an NHL referee. “She was definitely going to be an important part of the succession plan because she had been an important part of my career.”
Spouses see things other people don’t. Recovering from a road trip, which once required nothing more than a good night’s sleep, now requires two full days and all the ice the refrigerator can manufacture for application to the knees and other sore joints. That empirical knowledge can, over time, help the official perform an objective self-assessment which can in turn establish what Gregson calls the “common ground” necessary to help the league and the referee develop a departure schedule which will allow the person to “leave with dignity.”
Terms like “common ground” and “dignity” are fading quickly from the vocabularies of American employers, but that is a function of workplace mobility as much as it is management callousness. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports people between 18 and 42 (the age range which many of the league’s referees and linesmen occupy) have an average of 10 jobs during those years. NHL officials, unlike most American workers, spend multiple decades working for the same organization. When a referee or linesman retires it is now, thanks in large part to Gregson, formally acknowledged for a reason that is as quaint as it is noble — an appreciation of the official’s service to the league over the years.
While the league would certainly prefer to negotiate a departure plan that an active official will find satisfactory, Gregson’s primary responsibility is to make sure every member of the league’s officiating staff is able to perform at the levels required. As a result, if there is a wide divergence between the amount of time the league believes an official has left and the opinion of the official, it’s Gregson’s job to narrow the gap as tactfully as possible. As is the case with most employer-employee discussions, the opinion of the employer will prevail, but at least there is an element of empathy present in what could be a contentious series of conversations.
“At the end of the day, it is their puck,” said Marouelli. “You can either take advantage of the opportunity to plan your own departure or you can fight it. I’ve seen too many people leave our business angry and bitter.”
The magnitude of an official’s final departure from the profession is what prompted Gregson to develop a program that gives each official a chance to control or at least influence when and how it happens. The program was first implemented under Stephen Walkom’s reign as senior vice president and director of NHL officials. Walkom returned to the ice as a referee for the 2009-10 season.
The first step in the program is to negotiate a departure timeline which will make it possible to allow the official to choose his own retirement date.
“Veteran officials in good standing will always know when their last year of employment will be before the season starts,” Gregson said. “It’s almost like a victory lap.”
The idea of the “victory lap” met resistance when first proposed from some who felt an official in his final season wouldn’t bring the proper care and professionalism to his duties, a concern to which Gregson had a ready reply.
“I know the psyche of an official,” he said. “You do care, and you care until your last call.”
The final year, when negotiated through the succession program, can be enjoyable and memorable for the official. The league accommodated Marouelli’s request to work the NHL’s opening weekend in Helsinki, Finland, and linesman Lyle Seitz received an assignment to the outdoor Winter Classic played on New Year’s Day at Fenway Park.
Other requests have been less ambitious and more practical, like back-to-back games in Tampa and Sunrise, Fla., to allow a retiring official to bring his wife along for a midseason Florida vacation.
Every official gets to choose the rink in which he’ll call his final regular-season game. Linesman Mark Paré received scoreboard recognition at the United Center in Chicago during his farewell contest between the Blackhawks and the Red Wings, while Fraser worked his final game in Philadelphia, just a short trip from his New Jersey home. He received a crowd response that was far more friendly than that given to most of the city’s beleaguered athletes.
One thing the league will not guarantee for departing officials is a playoff assignment. Although it can certainly be requested, “working playoffs is non-negotiable,” said Gregson. “Those assignments are based on evaluations and performance during the regular season. Officials in their final season will get playoff assignments if they meet the standards, but that is not an item we would negotiate.”
While the conversations between Gregson and the officials may begin as informal chats, there are labor rules which govern relations between the league, represented initially by Gregson, and the National Hockey League Officials Association (NHLOA), the group representing the league’s referees and linesmen. An individual official’s succession plan does, in fact, become a written agreement binding on both the person and the league. What started as a professional courtesy designed by one former official to assist peers with their inevitable retirements has become league policy, codified in the current collective bargaining agreement (CBA), which was ratified in 2006. As the CBA itself says:
“The league may approach any official at any time, with confidential notice to the executive director of the NHLOA, to discuss career/succession planning issues and/or to plan a binding schedule for the official’s retirement.”
With the concept of the succession plan codified in the CBA, NHL officials have the opportunity to manage the final years of their careers. Previously, retirements were handled with less formality.
“As long as it’s not forced upon the official, it’s a no-brainer,” explains Fraser. “Ultimately the employer holds the cards. They obviously have to plan for their staffing requirements. If the employer feels the official or the player isn’t good enough anymore or they don’t want him on the team anymore, they’ll find a way to make the change, whether the player or official agrees to it or not.”
Gregson’s interest in developing the succession program was prompted by his own experiences. He approached the league with his own plan, seeking to retire upon reaching 25 years in the league at the age of 50.
“I knew the end was coming, but I didn’t really have a chance to talk about it,” he explained. “I believe when you get guys talking about it, (retirement) becomes more of a reality to them. Some guys don’t really want to talk, and then you have to explain the old-fashioned way (of retiring officials) wasn’t much fun for anybody. We’ve got allies now; eight people have gone through the succession program, and to be honest some are probably happier about it than others, but generally it has been a very good experience.”
Other officiating associations at the professional and amateur levels can apply some of the league’s “best practices” for the benefit of their own members, like the NHL has done.
• Establishing a standard retirement age is both unnecessary and discriminatory.
• Providing accommodations in scheduling as long as they don’t compromise the quality of officiating. Perhaps a departing official can in his final season get games that don’t require a 125-mile drive each way.
• An official may request an opportunity to work with an old friend a number of times during that last season or mentor a newer official.
To be successful, sports officials must have a thick skin and the ability to suppress emotion while an effective transition program must be rooted in compassion. As a result, the traits necessary to be a good referee seem to conflict with the characteristics required to create a dignified succession plan for one’s colleagues and peers. However ambitious it may become, an effective transition program starts with the responsible individual asking a simple question: How would I like to be treated as I consider retirement?
“That final year arrives much quicker than you think it will,” notes Gregson. “That last game is a very difficult one to do because once you leave the ice as an NHL referee your professional officiating days are over.”
Van Oler is a freelance writer and hockey official from Cincinnati.
