There are many ways for individuals to become involved in the sport of figure skating and contribute to the skating community. One important avenue is through officiating, including roles on the judging and technical panels. Events are volunteer ran and often require large number of officials on the panels.
If you are interested in becoming involved or would like further information on qualification pathways, please reach out via email to the attention of SAISA Judging Convenor to [email protected]
Composition of panels:
- Referee
- Designated leader(s), spokesperson for an event or segment in accordance with the official rules and manages the panel of Judges.
- Responsibilities include timing the programs, certain deductions (in IJS), deciding on all protests with respect to their event, conducting pre-event meetings (IJM) and are the point of contact for skaters/teams for program interruptions, in accordance with the rules.
- Judges
- Interprets rules and regulations, to evaluate the quality (Grade of Execution) of each element performed (Techical Score) and the quality of the performance (Presentation Score).
- The highest and lowest score of each element or program component are ignored and the average will be taken from the remainder, generating the trimmed mean starting with 5 Judges (average score).
- Accountant
- Works with the Competition Convenor and Referee beginning weeks sometimes months before a competition to build the competition.
- Responsible for preparing and providing the Referee, Judges and Technical Panel with documents for recording their decisions, that the scores are entered accurately during competition.
Technical Panel
- Technical Controller
- Authorises and/or corrects calls, supervises the Data Operator and can propose corrections, if necessary.
- Works with the Technical Specialists and liases with the Referee.
- Technical Specialists
- Identify and call the performed elements and the specific levels of difficulty of certain elements in accordance with the rules. Also identifies illegal or additional elements and falls.
- Data Operator
- Supports the technical panel by entering program elements as called by the Specialists.
- Replay Operator
- Captures video clips of all elements by tagging the beginning and end of each element through a touchscreen device.
The Technical Controller and Technical Specialist 2 support the primary Technical Specialist to ensure all elements are correctly identified. Final decisions on elements and levels are determined by the majority opinion of the controller and two specialists.
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