Intramurals: Peer-Selected Player-Officials

Dick Moss

Tags: Intramural, intramurals, officials, peer officials

Intramurals: Peer-Selected Player-Officials

For our intramural programs, we have difficulty, like many schools, in finding competent, motivated officials. So we decided to use player-officials for our team sports. As a result, our intramural helpers do not have to search (beg?) for officials for our lunch-time games.

Selecting Player-Officials

Here's how we get our player-officials. No game may begin until the two teams involved meet and select player-officials. Team A selects any player from Team B to be one of that game's player-officials, and Team B selects any player from Team A to be the other.

These two player-officials play for their teams while making all calls and helping the game proceed smoothly! It is very difficult to take exception with an official your team has selected and it's difficult to criticize an official who is also your team-mate!

For our program, this policy has worked extremely well and we will continue to use it. We've had great results with it and have avoided the traditional difficulties of finding students to competently officiate our intramural games.

Contributors: Mary Lou Facey & Lawrence Plue were teachers at Monsignor Doyle Catholic Secondary School in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada.