Official’s Team Blocks vs Time Blocks for their Team

“Official’s Team Blocks vs Time Blocks for their Team”

 We often get asked if blocking a team for an official will automatically make them unavailable during the times that their team is playing.  The short answer is no – they will need to manage their time blocks for their team’s activities in the same way that they would need to manage their time blocks for any other conflicting activities.

There are considerable challenges to doing this automatically this due to the extremely personal preferences that officials have when it comes to officiating games in close proximity to their own teams’ games.  For example, some might want to avoid any officiating the entire day if they have their own game.  Some might prefer to have them back-to-back.  That preference might change for an individual based on it being a weekend or weekday.  Or other factors that we don’t even know about.  Then there’s also the distance between venues (either home or away ones) that the system would not be able to calculate, nor would it know whether it needs to consider travel by car if the person is an adult or a bike/walk if they don’t have a car.  Then there’s the challenge of re-calculating all of these factors when either the team’s schedule changes -or- the assigned game schedule changes.  A system that tries to do this automatically seems like it would do it -at best- poorly.  It also de-emphasizes the importance of managing time blocks for other things (like activities in a different sport, for example) while introducing confusion about having two different ways to manage time blocks.

So, as mentioned while we agree this would be useful we don’t at the moment foresee a way to do it properly without adding some potential unintended negative consequences and therefore do not currently have plans to create this.