National Officials Certification Program

 

Badminton Alberta offers a comprehensive program for certification of officials at regional, provincial and national levels. Any person wishing to become involved in the sport as a lines person, service judge, umpire or tournament referee may register for a Badminton Alberta certification course provided they are current individual members of the association.

It is now a requirement for Badminton Alberta sanction of any tournament that a certified official be appointed as tournament referee. Responsibilities of the tournament referee include ensuring that seeding, draws and match schedules are in accordance with international and national standards; and that the rules of badminton are upheld at all times. The tournament referee is the final authority on all such matters at any sanctioned event and must be prepared to act as the arbitrator in any dispute between competitors and tournament organizers.

Through the financial support of the Alberta Sports Connection, Badminton Alberta is able to provide travel subsidies to officials who wish to attend clinics or seminars held outside of Alberta, for purpose of upgrading.

A minimum of four hours is required to offer an officiating course; consisting of two hours of classroom theory and two hours of on-court situational analysis. Before certification is granted at either level, a minimum of 10 hours of practical application for regional level 1 and 20 hours for provincial level 2 must be achieved prior to a final on-court adjudication by a master official course conductor/examiner.

 

Listed below are active Alberta officials with national, provincial and regional level qualifications:

• National Referee – Jeff Bell & Paula Sceviour
• National Umpire – Hilton Barnes (I), Jeff Bell, Mike Bilida (I), Lydia Cheng, Milaine Cloutier, Eileen Harle (I), Atul Hooda, Bruce Hossack (I), Dale Jenkins, Vive Kumar (I), Paul Marner (I), Paula Sceviour, Rajan Thiyagarajan, Don Torstensen (I), Elvi Torstensen (I) & Jane West (I), Benny Xu (I).
• Provincial Umpire – Diane Bolton, Herbie Kot, Peter Ing, James Lin, Bruce LaRocque, JR McDonald (I), Neil Prather (I), Rita Rusich (I), Rajan Thiyagarajan, Nazir Walji (I).
• Regional Umpire – Bruce Chivers (I), Doug Guild, David Howatt, Helen Lee, Cody LaRocque, Kathleen Malo, Bill Saunders & Kin Wong.
• Probationary – Kumud Achaya (I), Rocky Chan, Jimmy Chung, Paul Kam, Bryce Kopec, Miriam Li, Hoon Lim, Jeff Wang, Danny Long, Dan O'Reilly, Jesse Chen, Wooju Kim.

(I) denotes inactive official.

The Officials Committee has decided that in order to promote official development and proficiency, the following guidelines have been agreed upon. In order to be considered as an active official, and hence eligible to officiate at out of province and national tournaments, Regional and Provincial officials must umpire at least 10 matches per year and National level officials must umpire at least 20 matches per year. Completed score sheets should be forwarded to the Executive Director of Badminton Alberta on an annual basis. Officials not umpiring the required number of matches will be considered inactive.