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Happy New Year!  Duke Won!  UConn won! Basketball  season is officially over, and in a few months, my new year begins.  Thats right, at the end of June I'm headed for officiating summer camp.   In preparation for the new season, my eleventh year of officiating  I begin with  New Years Revelations.   Revelations, not resolutions  are important to me for they are more than  lessons learned. They are major stopping points during the season that force a confrontation with myself.  This is the time of year that I reflect on those unforgettable moments of pain, elation and confusion that have the force of redefining my goals.  There are four revelations from last year:

Over the past few months questions have been raised about the safety of artificial turf. I have followed the issue with interest, of course, and get e-mail requests every week asking for my views.

Frankly, I have mixed feelings about artificial turf.  I graduated from college with a full leg cast after suffering a torn ACL one March playing college lacrosse on a still partially frozen grass field in New Hampshire.  I wonder to this day whether the injury would have happened had I been playing on artificial turf.

Two weeks ago I was invited by the editors at Huffington Post to participate in a special blog event.  

The invitation read: 

The heart of every team and player experience is the coach. Coaches have a choice of going down one of two paths. One is a win-based approach. The other is often called developmental, but I prefer to call it "relationship- and experience-based coaching. "

Win-approach coaching is the most common by far (especially these days).  It involves short benches, and scheduling more and more games to build a winning record.  As a result, the dialogue between coach and players is one-sided and mostly counter-productive. It can result in brawls during the post-game handshake line, reckless play, lack of respect for the rules, opponents, officials, coaches and the game itself.

If you follow the subject of sports-related concussions, you've probably seen a flurry of news on the subject of impact sensors in the last couple of weeks. As someone who has been writing about and beta testing impact sensors for the past five years, I have, of course, been monitoring developments, too.