The following article relates to being considered for any judging panel. Because your score can directly influence the outcome of a meet, you must be prepared to give your best to the competitors. If you can say yes to any of the following ideas, then you should consider not being a candidate for any judging panel.
The above is but a small sample of judging mentalities that happen in diving. If you can not be objective in your assessment of a dive, you should not be a judge! When your primary focus is to help your diver or protect your diver, you shouldn’t be a panel judge. You can not be objective and because of this you can not be fair to the other divers in the contest. You must be able to establish a judging criteria that is the same for every diver in the contest.
It must be understood that there are many different techniques that can be used to complete a successful dive. No one technique is better than any other. The way it is performed makes the difference. You should judge the whole dive and not let these personal biases interfere with your score. You are being asked to enforce the rules equally for every contestant not just certain ones. If a diver who is not in the top 10 does a really good dive, he/she should receive a really good score.
Some people have a hard time judging twisters and/ or dives that over-twist a little. If this is you, work on that problem before getting on a judging panel. If you always miss form breaks, you have to develop an eye for detecting these breaks. The time to work on these defficeincies is not during a Sectional or State Meet. These skills can not be picked up overnight. They are developed over time by being constantly exposed to the sport.
The true measure of a human being is being able to admit to our shortcomings and act upon them. When in doubt, don't judge. You will be a point of discussion by your peers and others. Unfortunately, you may not hear any of this feed back. That seems to be a way of life in our diving community.
A couple of years ago, I put together a geometric diagram for judging that I titled "A New Judging Angle". It was mainly developed for our local coaches and officials. It was meant to be as simple as it was so people could understand it's content. The purpose of this effort was to help the high school officials do a more consistent job of judging and at least keep them in the ball park as far as scoring was concerned. It also helped new coaches to establish some criteria for giving scores. An ulterior motive was an attempt to keep some coaches from cheating. If more people were better informed, then maybe pressure would brought to get these people back in line. The "New Judging Angle" seemed to satisfy a need to get better performances out of both our coaches and officials. The simplicity of the idea was to gain some consensus, something that people could agree on.
I was asked to share this idea with the National Federation of High Schools Rules Committee. Prior to doing this, I received a phone call from a prominent, National coach. I basically was chastised by him because my diagrams were too simple to be used to describe Perfection. That is not even close to what I was trying to do. I was merely describing additional criteria for scores ranging from Zero to the Satisfactory ranges for High School age divers and added one criteria for scoring into the Good category. I even made a video to help demonstrate what I was talking about. The hardest thing to do in judging is to separate the bad dives from the really bad ones. At this point no effort was being made to do this. Bad dives were being scored very close to good dives. This type of scoring would keep a not so good diver within reach of a good diver and that's just not right.
There is now a move to start a judging school for diving judges which would include seven to ten days of going over the rules, covering biomechanics, viewing films and a few other things. If you have a real job, who has this kind of time? Could this be a move to keep judging in the hands of a very few people? I made this suggestion to that coach. "What we need is a class of ethical conduct and behavior" for our coaches who are used as judges. Many of our coaches seem to be in this business to make a name for themselves and not to enhance the sport. Maybe those in charge want this confusion so they can dictate what they want the rest of us to do. I can only hope that Judging in Diving doesn't end up as ridiculous as it has been in Ice Skating.
As I thought more about the mention of biomechanics, I came to the conclusion that it is unnecessary in judging. The reasons are very simple.
First, people are judging according to their own personal preferences (I like to see it done this way.). No other way is acceptable or as good.
Second, all rules books give at best only a fuzzy outline, mostly of penalty assessments that allow for greater subjectivity and not objectivity. There are no descriptions of what a good dive is or for that matter any dive. All of the rules books devote two to three pages about the actual judging of dives. The rest is devoted to managing the competition.
Examples:
Third, when judging why would you need to know what caused an over-twist or a dive to be failed? Those are coaching points. . Coaches need to know this so that they can help the diver make the proper corrections. All we should want judges to know is that the dive did in fact over-twist or was failed and give the appropriate score for that dive.
Example:
There have been 3 commonly accepted ways to do a forward dive 1/2 twist.
The ultimate question is why does it seem that some coaches only enforce the rules on someone else's diver and not their own? Many coaches do not enforce rules unless the referee makes the call. I feel that some of my colleagues think that I want them to give the exact same score I give. All I have ever wanted is, that if there is a deficient dive performed, then all judges must give a deficient score. You may be at 2 1/2 and I may give a 4 and both of us would be right. That is not happening even at the International level. A crowhop on a dive will not be penalized or for that matter even a split tuck. These are described in the rule books. Why aren't they being enforced? If we have a rule, then it should either be enforced or eliminated from the rules.
The purpose of this article is to shed some light on the judging problem. For the high schools there must be a National problem when the Federation includes a no more than 2 rule for not coming out of a tuck position before hitting the water. Yes, there are some people who have no idea how to judge, some are crooks and some are excellent. A judging school is a great idea if it is done right, but crooks will still be crooks and good judges will become better. The problem, I see relates to the people, who would like to know how to judge, may feel intimidated if the process is too complicated or cumbersome. Rather than broadening the judging base, we in fact would be narrowing it down considerably. I only hope that this doesn't happen. In my opinion, we are not very far from losing our judging credibility. For those who have the power to make changes, I can only hope that you consider the ramifications of your decisions.