Schedule

Or: I've Been Wrong in Public for 20 Years. Here's Everything I've Learned.
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My Background:
I spent 20 years officiating men's basketball and football.

At age 19, I started with intramurals at UVA, moved up through the high school circuit, grinded through the lower college ranks, and eventually reached NCAA Division I - in both sports.

D-I officials are the ~top 0.9% of all referees in that sport nationwide.

What You'll Learn:

Object-Level Officiating: The Craft

Bad vs. Good vs. Exceptional Officials: What makes the difference?
Referee the Defense; Referee Your Primary; Don't Guess; Call the Obvious: The 4 heuristics of good officiating (bad → good)
Angles; Advantage/Disadvantage; Game Management: The 3 heuristics of exceptional officiating (good →great)

Meta-Level Officiating: The Judgment

Meta-Decision Theory: How do you decide that it's time to decide?
Zero-Error Expectations: What does success look like when the standard - perfection - is impossible, and human fallibility is inevitable?
The Referee as a Legal System E2E: Cop (enforce) | Prosecutor (prove) | Judge (decide) | Supreme Court Jurist (does the rule mean what it says, or what rulemakers intended - and oh, btw - do you even have the authority to decide?)

Social-Level Officiating: The People

I.R.E.A.M. (Incentives Rule Everything Around Me): Referee vs. coach vs. player incentives - and how they can sow the seeds of conflict
👏🏽Yelling 👏🏽Fucking 👏🏽Works: Nate Silver says NFL head coaches yell because it's effective. [1][2] I say, "Eh...kinda..." Here's how it feels from the inside
Why People Loved to Hate Me: And why you just can't make people like you (here's the real reason)

Format:

My Hard-Earned Lessons & Learnings (30 minutes)
Q&A (15 minutes)
My Most Valuable Lesson: Holding Peak Focus Through 3 Hours of High-Stakes Chaos (10 minutes)

Why You Should Come:

"I truly hate all sports - but I loved your talk." - Audience feedback from my 3-minute version at minifest

Footnotes:

[1] NFL Coaches Yell At Refs Because It Freakin' Works - FiveThirtyEight
[2] Relatedly, a 2002 study found that when qualified soccer referees were shown video of a potential foul, they called 15.5% fewer fouls against the home team when the video included home crowd noise compared to silent video.

Nevill, A. M., Balmer, N. J., & Williams, A. M. (2002). The influence of crowd noise and experience upon refereeing decisions in football. Psychology of Sport and Exercise