How to collect referee availability before the season

Officials are usually happy to tell you when they can work. The trouble is that the answers arrive as forty differently worded messages spread across texts, emails and a group chat.

“Most Saturdays, not the 19th, and Sundays after 1 unless it’s a long drive” is useful, but you can’t filter or sort it, and you will re-read it every time you build a weekend. Collect availability in a shape you can act on without re-reading.

Ask for less than you think you need. Each extra question means fewer people finish the form, and short answers from everyone are more useful than detailed answers from some.

The core, from everyone

• Dates they cannot work. See below for why this works better than asking for dates they can.
• A weekly pattern, if they have one.“Never Sunday mornings”, “Fridays only after 6”. One line covers the whole season.
• A ceiling. The most games they want per weekend or per week. It is the simplest way to avoid over-assigning a willing official.
• Travel limit.A radius, or the venues they will and won’t go to. Venue names often work better than miles, because people know the drive.

The useful extras

• Levels or age groups they are willing to take. This can differ from what they are certified for.
• Positions they prefer or won’t take: plate or bases, center or AR.
• Whether they want more games than last season, the same, or fewer. Asking in August can head off workload complaints later.

Ask once a draft game schedule exists, about three weeks before you assign the first block. Earlier, people don’t know yet. Later, you are assigning on guesses.

For the deadline:

• Say what happens after it.For example: after this date, assignments go out based on what we have, and if we have nothing from you we’ll assume you are available. Or the reverse, if that is your policy. Either works as long as officials know which.
• Make it a weekday.That leaves you working days to follow up with anyone who hasn’t answered.
• Send one reminder, two days before. More than one makes the deadline look negotiable.

Keep these two apart. Mixed together in one free-text box, they are hard to use.

A recurring patternis a rule: never Sunday mornings, never before 10am, no Fridays during the school term. It applies all season and doesn’t need re-asking. Keep it on the official’s record, next to their phone number, so you don’t repeat it on 26 dated rows.

A blackout date is a specific date: a wedding, a holiday, a tournament with another association. It goes in the availability list, one row per date, and stops mattering once the date passes.

In the spreadsheet template, the pattern goes in the notes column on the officials sheet and the dates go on the availability sheet.

Accepting replies however they arrive and tidying them up yourself works for a pool of eight. At thirty, it is an evening of data entry every month.

Whatever tool you use:

• Ask one question per thing. Don’t fold dates, travel and level into “anything else we should know?”.
• Collect dates from a picker or a fixed list. Typed dates produce “Oct 12”, “12/10” and “the second Saturday” in the same column.
• Add one optional free-text box at the end, for whatever your form didn’t anticipate.
• Record who answered, separately from what they said. It is how you tell “available” from “hasn’t replied”.

A form built this way, question by question with the answer type for each, is in the referee availability form template.

By October, some of what officials told you in August is wrong. A row that says “available” looks the same whether it was confirmed yesterday or five months ago.

Put a date on every availability row: when they told you, not when you typed it. Then you can see which answers are old.

Three habits help:

• Invite updates. Tell officials at the start that they can send changes any time without waiting to be asked.
• Give them a way to update it.If the August form is closed by October, October’s changes end up in your inbox. In Ref Grid, you can send an official a new link to their weekly pattern at any time (see below).
• Re-ask only at natural breaks: a new season, the start of playoffs, the switch to midweek games. Monthly requests stop getting answers.

An official told you they were free, you gave them a game, and now they can’t make it. Work in this order:

• Update their availability, so you don’t assign them to the same date again.
• Release the assignment, so the position shows as open.
• Then find the replacement. If you contact a replacement while the schedule still shows the original official, two people can end up thinking 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 collects the weekly pattern, not the dates. You send each official a link to their profile by text or email. It opens on their previous answers: the days they prefer to work, whether that’s mornings, afternoons or evenings, the divisions they want, and a free-text note. There’s no account or password. A link works for 30 days, and you can send a new one whenever you want fresh answers.

The answers show on the roster next to each name, with the date the official last confirmed them (“Updated 12 days ago”, or “Never confirmed”). They are a guide while you assign and never block an assignment.

The rest of this article, including blackout dates, the ceiling on games and the travel limit, isn’t in Ref Grid, and there is no way to import a dated sheet. Keep that in a form (the availability form template has the questions ready to rebuild in Google Forms), a shared sheet, or the availability sheet in our free template, which has the columns described above.

More on the product: sports officials scheduling software, or the end-to-end scheduling workflow this step sits inside.