Originally Posted by
Thomas477
I’m sorry, but that’s not true. They’re not being “pushed” into the zone league. It’s just a lot of the refs would have been doing a/a & o/35s are wanting to push themselves and see how they go into zone league. It’s also happening with juniors, a lot of the first years who would start in juniors are bypassing that and going straight to northern’s 11/12s SAP and junior newfm/npl as opposed to doing their apprenticeship in the various junior comps. There has also been a big movement of referees from the junior branches to northern over the past few years, and a range of ability levels. What you also find is that a lot of these referees would be covering up to 9 games over a weekend with the junior branches, whereas now, due to various reasons, they’re not doing anything near that. The junior branches never really recovered from this loss.