I will now make my attempt at taking cfka’s title of super-ranter.
The key to great jump marks in division III are:
– extremely low sand
– measuring from the wrong end of the board
– misreading the tape
Key to poor marks are:
– measuring with a tape where the metric 0 is 1 foot into the tape
– measuring from the far end of the foul plasticine
In the past 1 or 2 seasons I have had the following occur:
1) Triple jumper jumped something like 18.97m due to a totally illogical official error. it was actually recorded (I just had to let that one slide :)) then later my best long jumper flipped out and asked how a 40′ triple jumper just annihilated the world record.
2) I had 3 jumpers seeded around 6.80m. Officials actually made snide comments after their jumps about our seeding procedures when they were all jumping 6.30s. Hearing that, I promptly informed them that 0 on their metric tape started a foot into the tape. This has happened at least 5 times in the last few years (usually minus the snide comments).
3) At conference my long jumper was in second place going in to the last round. A lower ranked jumper jumped and the official measured from the wrong end of the takeoff board. I know because I was standing right there and saw the tape. After I told him he just randomly measured from the wrong end he yanked up the tape and promptly denied it. This official was later seen at a bigger meet measuring EVERY jump from the wrong end. There were a lot of happy jumpers and national qualifiers that day. I informed the meet director and his solution was to let all prior marks stand but future marks would be measured correctly. So if you jumped early, you got a free 20cm.
4) Old women officials clearly marking 2″+ fouls and fouling legal jumps.
If you can weather these circumstances and still have brainpower left, then you can be an effective division3 coach.