How to collect referee availability before the season

Nobody struggles to get availability. Officials are usually happy to tell you when they can work. The struggle is that it arrives as forty individual sentences, each one slightly different, spread across texts, emails and one reply in a group chat that scrolled away.

“Most Saturdays, not the 19th, and Sundays after 1 unless it’s a long drive” is genuine, useful information from a helpful person. It is also unusable: you cannot filter it, you cannot sort by it, and you will re-read it every time you build a weekend for the next four months. Forty of those is a research project every Tuesday night.

The goal is availability you can act on without re-reading it. Everything below is in service of that.

Ask for less than you think. Every extra question lowers the response rate, and a 60% response rate is worse than a smaller set of answers from everybody.

The core, from everyone

• Dates they cannot work. Not dates they can — see below.
• A weekly pattern, if they have one.“Never Sunday mornings”, “Fridays only after 6”. One line, and it covers the whole season.
• A ceiling. Maximum games per weekend, or per week. This is the single most useful number you can have and almost nobody asks for it. It prevents the accidental over-assignment that turns a willing official into one who stops replying.
• Travel limit. A radius, or the venues they will and will not go to. Venue names beat miles — people know the drive, not the distance.

The useful extras

• Levels or age groups they are willing to take, which is not the same as what they are certified for.
• Positions they prefer or will not take — plate versus bases, center versus AR.
• Whether they want more games than last season, the same, or fewer. Ask once in August and half your fairness problems disappear.

Ask once the game schedule exists in draft form, and about three weeks before you need to assign the first block. Earlier than that and people genuinely do not know; later and you are assigning on guesses.

Three things make the deadline work:

• Say what happens after it. Not a threat — just a fact: after this date, assignments go out based on what we have, and if we have nothing from you we will assume you are around. Or the reverse, if that is your policy. Either is fine; ambiguity is not.
• Make it a weekday, not a Sunday night. You want to be able to chase the stragglers during a working week.
• Send one reminder, two days out. One. A second reminder teaches people that the first deadline was not real.

These are two different things and mixing them into one free-text box is where most availability collection falls apart.

A recurring patternis a rule: never Sunday mornings, never before 10am, not during the school term on Fridays. It applies to the whole season, it does not need re-asking, and it should live on the official’s record next to their phone number — not in the availability list, where you would have to repeat it 26 times.

A blackout date is a specific date: a wedding, a holiday, a tournament with another association. It belongs in the availability list, one row per date, and it expires the moment the date passes.

Keeping them separate means the pattern stays true all season while the dated rows churn, which is exactly how the two behave in real life. In the spreadsheet template, the pattern goes in the notes column on the officials sheet and the dates go on the availability sheet.

It is tempting to accept replies however they arrive and tidy them up yourself. That works for a pool of eight. At thirty it is an evening a month, and it is an evening spent doing data entry rather than assigning.

Whatever tool you use, the shape that survives contact with reality:

• One question per thing. Do not combine dates and travel and level into “anything else we should know?”.
• Dates as dates, from a picker or a fixed list. Typed dates produce “Oct 12”, “12/10” and “the second Saturday” in the same column.
• One free-text box, at the end, clearly optional. People need somewhere to put the thing your form did not anticipate — and having exactly one place for it means you only have one place to read.
• Record who answered.Separately from what they said. This is the field that lets you distinguish “available” from “silent”, and it is the one people leave out.

Availability collected in August is a snapshot of what someone believed in August. By October some of it is wrong, and the wrong parts are invisible — a row that says “available” looks identical whether it was confirmed yesterday or five months ago.

The cheap fix is a date stamp on every availability row: when they told you, not when you typed it. Then staleness is visible, and you can treat a February answer about a May weekend with appropriate suspicion.

Beyond that, two habits do most of the work:

• Make updating easy and unsolicited. Tell people once, at the start: if something changes, send it, you do not need to wait to be asked. Most officials will. The ones who do not were never going to fill in a mid-season form either.
• Re-ask at natural boundaries only. The turn of a season, the start of playoffs, the switch to midweek fixtures. Re-asking monthly gets ignored by month three.

This is the case everyone forgets to design for, and it is common: someone told you they were free, you gave them a game, and now they are not free.

The order matters.

• Update the availability record, so you do not re-assign them to the same date next week.
• Then release the assignment, so the position reads as open rather than filled-but-doomed.
• Then find the replacement. Not before — a replacement contacted while the schedule still shows the original is how two people end up believing they have the same game.

If it is late in the week, the full sequence is in what to do when a referee cancels at the last minute.

Ref Grid does not collect availability, and it does not import it. Everything on this page is the step that happens before the assignment board, and you should run it however suits you — a form, a shared sheet, or the availability sheet in our free template, which has the columns described above.

What Ref Grid holds is the other half: the roster the availability is about — every official, an email address or a mobile number, the channel they answer on, and your notes — and then the games, the assignments you build once you know who is around, the text and email that go out, and the accepts and declines that come back.

That division is worth knowing before you evaluate anything. A tool that collects availability but leaves you to send forty messages has solved the smaller half of the problem; the transcription between the two is where the evenings actually go.

More on what is and is not in there: sports officials scheduling software, or the end-to-end scheduling workflow this step sits inside.