Through the summer sports season, Softball ACT runs three regular competitions: junior softball and teeball on Saturday mornings, open women's softball on Saturday afternoons, and open men's softball on Monday and Tuesday evenings. There are also occasional catch-up games and special events on Sundays and other weeknights.
The umpiring roster is organised around the Softball ACT draw. Here's how the rostering process works:
- Put your availability into HWR. We use the Horizon Web Ref rostering tool to manage allocations. You have complete control over when you are and are not available for games in the tool, so if you haven't updated it to list yourself as available, you won't be allocated any games. We expect you to have your availability in by Tuesday, or Wednesday afternoon at the latest, because ...
- We start working on allocations on Wednesday afternoons. We'll do allocations as time permits during Wednesday afternoon, then double-check before publishing allocations on Wednesday evening. Once a game is published, it's available for you to accept.
- You review your game assignments and confirm them on Thursday. Sometimes we misinterpret what you told us for your availability, or something comes up that means you can't do a timeslot you said you were available for. That's okay, just email us and let us know. Otherwise, if nothing's wrong with your allocation, go ahead and accept it on Thursday.
- We do a final check-through for issues. The draw might have changed (this is rare, but does happen, and it's a lot of work when it does). Or we might have had to make drastic changes because of changes to someone's availability. If this happens, you'll get a new notification and may be asked to re-confirm your availability.
- We share the games covered list with teams. Once everyone has accepted their availability, we go on to let the teams know which extra games we'll cover in the coming week. Teams expect to hear from us on Thursday night. Once we've shared the games list (on our website and on Facebook), we are locked in to covering those games -- and, unless you fall sick or get injured, we expect you to be there.
