Andy Boyer

Category: Human Behavior

  • Guest Post – The Referee’s Perspective: Sometimes We Know What We Are Doing

    Editor’s Note: Garrett Galbreath is a high school basketball official in Washington State and a Board Member for the Snohomish County Basketball Officials. Since I am someone who has ALWAYS treated sports officials with the greatest of respect, and NEVER engaged in any kinds of disagreement with one rearding the idiocy of their calls, laziness on the field, or out and out incompetence, I wanted to get an opinion from his side of the whistle. Why do some parents, coaches, and players insist on arguing with these highly trained and well-meaning people, simply for screwing up a call on the field? This is the 1st post in the series of, “The Referee’s Perspective.”

    As high school basketball official, I have heard just about every criticism a coach, player or parent can offer. Sometimes I register the good advice, “Watch the hook on the post!” …and consider it the next time I am in a position to observe post play.

    garrettgalbreath_officialBut most of the time, we are bombarded with simple and contradictory instructions for how the game should be officiated. One minute its, “Call the foul!” The next, “Let them play!” What’s an official to do?

    The answer is more nuanced than most people think. My general philosophy on officiating is broken into three mandates:
    1) Keep the players safe
    2) Enforce the rules
    3) Consider the game

    These (personal) rules are listed in order of importance, but numbers two and three blur a bit in many situations.

    Some Examples

    Parents Yelling 1Consider a typical 5th grade game. If we were to enforce all the rules in the NFHS rule book, the ball would never cross half-court because we would call travel violations on every possession. Nobody wants to sit through that. Instead, we have to balance where the rules must be enforced and when to let them slide for the sake of the kids trying to learn the game.

    As officials, we try to balance the rules vs the game by looking at advantage/dis-advantage. Did a player gain an advantage by violating a rule? No? Maybe it’s best to let it go so the game continues.

    Coaches Yelling 2We need to apply the same logic in a high school game. Although our tolerance for violations narrows a bit, we still have to consider the skill level of the players. Our 3A state champion team is probably going to have a different skill level than a rural 2B team with 6 varsity players. We have to figure out how to manage that gap in skill sets every single game.

    So to you parents pleading for a foul at one end of the court while imploring that we let them play at the other end… Most of us saw the same thing you saw. By the rule book, you might be correct. We could make you sit through an hour of inbound passes.

    Parents Yelling 2But remember, youth and high school sports are for the kids. In addition to being competitive events, they are teaching opportunities and a way for your kids to gain confidence. Our decisions might be different than yours, because we are working hard on blending a need to enforce the rules of the game while considering the quality of the experience.

    Please include any questions in the comments below and I’ll be happy to answer them.

  • One Human, One Block, One Year: An Idea for Solving Homelessness

    So file this under pie in the sky, hopeless ideas that have no chance of coming true.

    Unless, that is, one person tries to get it going.

    NPR published an interesting article the other day about Homelessness in Seattle. One stat stood out: “According to the latest count, in January, more than 3,700 people live on the streets of King County. The number of people sleeping outside shot up by 20 percent in just the past year.”

    3,700.

    Via NPR

    That number sounds enormous when you are thinking about how a government agency could fix the problem. And the government has proven it can’t do it. Here’s another stat from the article, one that should make you pretty mad. “All told, under a 10-year plan put together a decade ago by a public-private partnership called the Committee to End Homelessness, roughly $1 billion has gone to the cause.”

    $1 Billion spent in 10 years. 3,700 homeless. At $100 million spent per year, we could just pay every homeless person an annual salary of $27,000 and just close down whatever services are trying to solve the problem.

    But 3,700 is also a really small number.

    King County has 2.044 Million people. For every 1 homeless person in Seattle, there are 550 non-homeless. This is the math I use to think there’s an opportunity at fixing this problem.

    One Human, One Block, One Year
    The idea is simple philosophically. Homelessness stops being a macro issue that we need “leaders” and “organizations” to try to solve. Homeless people need to stop being nameless, anonymous shadows that we can easily ignore on the side of the on ramp.

    Let’s make homelessness a neighborhood cause. And not just a neighborhood cause, but a block cause.

    I’m going to guess that almost every city block contains the following things:
    – A house with an unused shed, mother-in-law attachment, garage or other structure that could be fitted with a simple bathroom. (And if not, a group of 20 people who’d split the rent on an apartment for someone.)
    – At least one if not more people who hire part-time help.
    – Someone who is or knows a psychologist, therapist or life coach.
    – A teacher.
    – A retired person willing to occasionally give someone a ride.
    – Someone who’d spring for a bus pass.
    – Neighbors with extra clothing they can give to a specific human.
    – People who will donate money to make sure someone they know is well fed.

    When you think of the idea that 550 people working together could help a single person get off the street, it seems almost mathematically insane that we have homeless people in the first place.

    Now yes, I know that there are gigantic holes in this idea. Addiction, dementia, stubbornness, safety. These are all issues that would have to be dealt with. Then you’d have to get through the government red tape of permits, zoning, etc…

    But doesn’t it seem doable? Doesn’t it seem like if everyone who lived on your block assembled for two hours one Sunday afternoon, you could come up with everything you need to get someone a home, a part-time job, a wardrobe, counseling, a bus pass, some education and tutoring, addiction treatment if necessary, and most of all – friends in a neighborhood. Friends who want to see their guest succeed and move on to successfully re-start their own life in 12 months.

    That’s my utopian idea. One human, being helped by one block of neighbors, for one year.

  • Bridging the Social Media Ocean

    When I chose to go back to Grad School at the UW  in 2004, I made a conscious decision that after I graduated, I would say “Yes” to every opportunity to learn more that would ever be thrown at me.

    In the first few years, saying “Yes” meant speaking at the Undergraduate Marketing Club or Young Entrepreneurs Club, or meeting with VCIC students. That evolved into judging the UW Business Plan Competition, taking on interns for projects and guest lecturing from time to time. Before I knew it, I was teaching  real classes, trying to implement the parts of business school I benefited from the most as a student, while shedding the parts that I saw no value in.

    And so here we are today. I just finished up the first part of  the two days I have the privilege to spend working with MBA students visiting the UW from Lucerne University in Switzerland. I wish someone would have asked 4 years ago if I ever thought I’d be teaching students who live 8,000 miles away. I wonder what m response would have been.

    My discussions with them today reminded me about something I think proud Seattleites often forget. Namely, there are way more people in the world that don’t share the every aspect of the Northwest’s rain driven, liberal thinking, social media embracing, technology-centric, environmentally-maniacal, privacy shunning state of mind.

    For example, other countries haven’t necessarily adopted the idea that every ham sandwich we eat should get its own Instagram photo, or why we would want our boss to know what articles we are reading.  The idea of building personal blogs to gratify our egos and promote our social importance isn’t necessarily a worldwide phenomenon yet.

    But what is important is that globally, smart people want to learn more. Whether we are American, Swiss, German, Japanese, Korean, etc… there are people who want to understand how others think. They may not understand why, and they may not want to emulate it, but they want to understand the “how.” And the more people we have around the world who want to learn about how other cultures act, work, play and live, the better chance we have at finding a common ground.

    Moral of the story: Always say yes to anything you can learn from.  You’ll never regret it.

  • Tossing 15 Things a Day

    My friend Liz told me that she has a pact with herself. She throws away 15 things a day. It could be 15 pieces of paper, 15 paper clips or 5 shirts and 10 paper towels. It doesn’t matter. 15 things go into the trash (or charity bin).

    She said it’s not that hard to do, and less painful than a whole day of spring cleaning.

    By the end of the week, she’s tossed 105 things.
    By the end of the month, 450.
    By the end of the year, 5400.

    Maybe I can’t do 15, maybe I can only start with 10. But I am going to start to do that today.

  • The Power of “Yes”

     

    I could have you click over to Seth Godin’s blog, which I strongly suggest you add to your list of daily reads. (You can even have it delivered via email, it’s that easy…)

    But in case you are just browsing through and don’t want to click a link, here’s some wise words for the day.

    Seth GodinOn behalf of yes
    Yes, it’s okay to ship your work.
    Yes, you’re capable of making a difference.
    Yes, it’s important.
    Yes, you can ignore that critic.
    Yes, your bravery is worth it.
    Yes, we believe in you.
    Yes, you can do even better.
    Yes.

    Yes is an opportunity and yes is an obligation. The closer we get to people who are confronting the resistance on their way to making a ruckus, the more they let us in, the greater our obligation is to focus on the yes.

    There will always be a surplus of people eager to criticize, nitpick or recommend caution. Your job, at least right now, is to reinforce the power of the yes.

    Seth, if you want me to pull this down, just say the word. I just felt like sharing it with my own tiny little tribe.

  • Perfection

    20 years from now, anyone who is a Mariners fan will remember how they watched Felix Hernandez dispatch the final 3 Tampa Bay Rays to pitch the 1st perfect game in team history. This video from the Jackson General, the Mariners AA team, is tough to beat.

  • The Reach of a Tweet

    So I work in social media.  I teach some social media.  I play around in some social media channels.  I own a blog with my own name as its url simply so I show up in Google searches.  Through all these years playing around in social media as a profession, I’ve never really made it a huge focus of my personal life.  Maybe I’ll make a connection here or there.  But nothing substantial.

    And yet today, a simple tweet seemed to strike a chord with people.

    All day long Occupy Seattle mayhem shut down streets downtown.  People couldn’t get home from work.  Rogue anarchists broke windows.  Children couldn’t be picked up from school.  Store clerks feared for their safety.  Middle class parents – and their bosses – had to figure out what was best for their kids, their businesses and their co-workers.

    I was unaffected by the chaos despite being right around the corner from it.  I took my wife home from her surgery but thought to myself, “Thank God this mayhem didn’t affect us getting to the hospital, or home from it.” I tried to rid my mind of thoughts of how angry I would be if I was stuck in traffic due to a protest, while my wife sat groggily in pain in the passenger seat of our car.

    I scanned the Twitter stream and noticed that people who supported OWS had lost patience with OccupySeattle.  OccupySeattle wasn’t about a revolution anymore.  What started with good intentions but no real purpose, had transformed into an incubator for people with negative intentions and directed purpose. The movement had created a dark side, or at least allowed the dark side to breed.

    And so I said:

    Dear #OccupySeattle. The 99% has gotten together & decided we need better representation. Thx for the effort.  Good luck w/ future endeavors.”

    It was exactly 140 characters.  My point was pretty clear.  Whatever goodwill the original Occupy movement had generated had been pretty much decimated here in Seattle.  The most liberal town in America was saying, “WTF are you guys doing? You are totally destroying this.”

    Meanwhile,  my most nagging thought as I hit “Tweet this” was whether I should be using “has” or “have” for the verb.  I was out of characters, so I went with the former. It was a quick line, and after I sent it, I had all but forgotten about it.

    A few hours later, it’s become the most retweeted thing I’ve ever sent out. For the first time ever, I started trending in Seattle.  People we retweeting this because they agreed with the sentiment.  And yet two tweets back at me stand out:

    To the 1st repsonse I counter, “I agree. To the normal everyday 99%, the rogue hooligans have nothing to do with OWS.  However, Occupy Seattle has little to do with OWS as well.  Somehow OccupySeattle has developed an identity of its own, and not in a good way.”

    The 2nd response made me realize I had struck a nerve with some folks.  I run a small business, invest in a startup and teach at a University.  I enjoy creating commerce and inspiring others to do the same.  More commerce means more transactions.  More transactions means more jobs.  More jobs means more wealth for everyone.  But to this person, I was simply “snarky.”  Trying to build small businesses and encouraging entrepreneurship isn’t enough. I’m evil because I don’t want to join or represent a revolution with no goal or purpose.

    It will be interesting to see if this tweet fades away into the night as May Day passes.  Maybe more and more people will agree with the sentiment and retweet it.  Or, will we see more of the negative side of #OccupySeattle come out tomorrow.   Either way, it’s a great social media lesson in progress.

  • A Debate – What is Appropriate Fan Behavior at a Bar

    This blog has been a lot of things over the years. Of course, it’s also NOT been a lot of things over the years.  But, it has always strived to be fair.  If we criticize someone for absurd behavior, we’ll turn the focus on ourselves if we commit the same behavior.

    I’ve probably made fun of fans of other colleges at some point, so I thought I’d use an example from Saturday’s Elite Eight Game to spur some debate and show I can be fair.

    The setup: The Ballard Loft is a very UA friendly bar.  And Saturday the Seattle chapter of the UA Alumni Club gathered to watch the Cats vs UConn game.  I’d estimate there were at least 75-85 Cats fans upstairs.  Now, I don’t spend a lot of time with this group.  But suddenly all of the UW fans I usually watch hoops with lost interest in the NCAA Tourney.  (I can’t imagine why.)  And it was the biggest UA hoops game in the last 5-6 years, so I needed to surround myself with supporters.  Btw, this is what makes sports so great.  The ability to show up and have a common bond with total strangers.  But I digress.

    So imagine this scene.  You have a crowd of 75-85 energized UA basketball fans, decked out in UA gear, drinking beers, watching the game, cheering when appropriate and feeling anguish simultaneously….. And you have one guy in the corner.  He has a pom pom.  Every time UConn has the ball, he is shouting “Defense, Wildcats Defense.  Defense, Wildcats Defense.”  Every time Arizona has the ball he runs through one of his pre-programmed 4 or 5 A-R-I-Z-O-N-A cheers.  He is desperate to have the other 75 of us join him, but we’re watching the game.  Now every once in a while, the group of 6 people in the back would start a cheer and everyone would join.  And Wanna Be Wilbur would beem as if the crowd was “finally getting it.”  Then he would start up again and we’d all ignore him again.  Rinse, wash, repeat for 39:00 of basketball.

    The suddenly, with a minute left, Wanna Be Wilbur and his buddy actually turned on the crowd.  And I submit that this is why UA lost that game.  In a tight ballgame with everything on the line, as every other UA fan in the bar – hell in the country – nervously wondered what would happen next and frantically shared with each other what we though would happen, Wanna Be Wilbur started YELLING AT US.  He told us how bad of fans we were for not cheering with him.  He kept up with how lame UA fans were at this bar.  How he couldn’t figure out what he was doing with such lame people.  The poor schmuck seemed not to realize that we were in Seattle, about 1,200 miles from the stadium, and that no matter how loud we cheered, Derek Williams was NOT going to hear us.

    If you were at the Loft on Saturday you saw 75 drinking, cheering, excited UA fans enjoying a great basketball game.  You also heard an incredibly annoying UA fan yelling at his colleagues for not joining his one man Pom Squad.  The annoying UA guy broke all fan protocols by yelling at other UA fans.  I’d make fun or Oregon, UW, WSU, Duke, or Notre Dame if they had a fan who pulled that kind of behavior, so I have to make fun of us as well.  

    So my debate question – If you are at a bar watching your team play a game, are you less of a fan if you don’t chant and sing at the TV screen, even if one guy in the corner holding a pom pom is begging you to? I say there’s appropriate stadium behavior and appropriate bar behavior.  Objections?

  • The King of Soccer Divers

    Gee, why do soccer players get such a bad name…

  • “Targeted” Marketing

    Not joking here – I actually heard this ad on Sacramento radio after NFL football on Sunday evening.

    “Acme Store (can’t remember real store name) wants to remind you about California’s 10 day waiting period to buy firearms.  So if you are purchasing a handgun for a Christmas present this year, and want to have it wrapped by Christmas Eve, remember that you’ll need to complete your purchase by December 14.  

    Remember, ammunition and other supplies are not subject to the 10 day waiting period.  But to make sure you complete your holiday list in time to put everything under the tree, make sure you come in before Dec 14.”

    Now, there was more ad copy here, but for obvious reasons, my brain was not able to concentrate any further… Definitely my favorite ad of the month.