Craig Wiedel
Founder of Better Every Match
craigwiedel@gmail.com
Many of you are also probably wondering where the name "Better Every Match" (BEM) came from and I wanted to explain how it came to fruition.
Last year was my 25th year of officiating high school volleyball in Nebraska and with COVID cancelling most of my college matches in the fall, I was able to officiate more high school matches. With COVID as well as the shortage of officials in general, I struggled to find officials to work many of the matches that I assigned so I ended up working some of those matches with many of you. This was a great experience for me and I hope was for you as well. By doing this, my observation was that many of the qualities and mechanics that I feel make a great official are not as easy to do especially when the high school season is so short and we don't get a lot of opportunities to work on becoming better and learning new skills and techniques (especially if we work with the same partners night after night). I want to spend my next 25 years helping grow and develop new high school volleyball officials with the overall goal for all of us is to become "Better Every Match". I have had so many great people help me grow and develop as an official and this will be one way of giving back. The mission of BEM will be to focus on high school volleyball officials. It will take a village to do this and I will be reaching out to many of you other "seasoned" officials to help me with this mission as well.
Last year was my 25th year of officiating high school volleyball in Nebraska and with COVID cancelling most of my college matches in the fall, I was able to officiate more high school matches. With COVID as well as the shortage of officials in general, I struggled to find officials to work many of the matches that I assigned so I ended up working some of those matches with many of you. This was a great experience for me and I hope was for you as well. By doing this, my observation was that many of the qualities and mechanics that I feel make a great official are not as easy to do especially when the high school season is so short and we don't get a lot of opportunities to work on becoming better and learning new skills and techniques (especially if we work with the same partners night after night). I want to spend my next 25 years helping grow and develop new high school volleyball officials with the overall goal for all of us is to become "Better Every Match". I have had so many great people help me grow and develop as an official and this will be one way of giving back. The mission of BEM will be to focus on high school volleyball officials. It will take a village to do this and I will be reaching out to many of you other "seasoned" officials to help me with this mission as well.