Duncan Mascarenhas – författare

This essential guidebook provides a comprehensive, holistic, and evidence-based account for improving the decision making of sports officials across different sports and levels. By combining cutting-edge research with practical strategies, this book provides fundamental frameworks for developing decision-making skills that support the needs of officials themselves, officiating educators, sport organizations, and academics. This cross-disciplinary collaboration ensures the book stays grounded in both theory and practice, offering readers a well-rounded, state-of-the-art understanding of the subject.

Divided into three key sections, the book first explores the unique demands and types of decisions faced by officials in different sports. Next, fundamental cognitive and mental factors that influence decision making are explained, emphasizing the creation of knowledge, the influences on decision processes, and the role of mental health and psychological management on decision-making performance. Finally, the book outlines pragmatic and innovative strategies for supporting, assessing, and training decision making and creating effective development climates for sports officials. Future trends in the evolution of technology use for training and assessing officials – spanning grassroots to elite levels – are also discussed, including artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), and other immersive learning tools.

Each chapter is enriched by "Knowledge in Practice" boxes, which bring the experiences and perspectives of sports officials, officiating educators and administrators, and sports scientists from around the globe to light. These provide real-world examples and lessons for how decision making can be improved in various sporting contexts.

Decision Making for Sports Officials: Training and Assessment Perspectives is a core resource for enhancing decision making in the high-stakes world of sports officiating.

This essential guidebook provides a comprehensive, holistic, and evidence-based account for improving the decision making of sports officials across different sports and levels. By combining cutting-edge research with practical strategies, this book provides fundamental frameworks for developing decision-making skills that support the needs of officials themselves, officiating educators, sport organizations, and academics. This cross-disciplinary collaboration ensures the book stays grounded in both theory and practice, offering readers a well-rounded, state-of-the-art understanding of the subject.

Divided into three key sections, the book first explores the unique demands and types of decisions faced by officials in different sports. Next, fundamental cognitive and mental factors that influence decision making are explained, emphasizing the creation of knowledge, the influences on decision processes, and the role of mental health and psychological management on decision-making performance. Finally, the book outlines pragmatic and innovative strategies for supporting, assessing, and training decision making and creating effective development climates for sports officials. Future trends in the evolution of technology use for training and assessing officials – spanning grassroots to elite levels – are also discussed, including artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), and other immersive learning tools.

Each chapter is enriched by "Knowledge in Practice" boxes, which bring the experiences and perspectives of sports officials, officiating educators and administrators, and sports scientists from around the globe to light. These provide real-world examples and lessons for how decision making can be improved in various sporting contexts.

Decision Making for Sports Officials: Training and Assessment Perspectives is a core resource for enhancing decision making in the high-stakes world of sports officiating.

Sports officials (umpires, referees, judges) play a vital role in every sport, and sports governing bodies, fans, and players now expect officials to maintain higher professional standards than ever before. In this ground-breaking book, a team of leading international sport scientists and top level officials have come together to examine, for the first time, the science and practice of officiating in sport, helping us to better understand the skills, techniques and physical requirements of successful refereeing.

The book covers every key component of the official’s role, including:

Top-level officials or officiating managers contribute in the ‘Official’s Call’ sections, reflecting on their experiences in real in-game situations across a wide range of international sports, and on how a better understanding of science and technique can help improve professional practice. No other book has attempted to combine leading edge contemporary sport science with the realities of match officiating in this way, and therefore this book is vital reading for any advanced student of sport science, sport coaching or sport development, or any practising official or sports administrator looking to raise their professional standards.