As a 25 year season ticket holder at the Houston (RPI) Field House, I've seen my share of good and horrendous referees. I see Harry Ammian's name coming up quite often and I can see where he gets his reputation. Harry has a tendency to be very lenient on the elbowing, charging and roughing calls and a real stickler for tripping and hooking. And he is guilty of calling a much tighter game in the first 2 periods and letting things go at the end of the third, especially in a tight game. But Harry has one thing going for him, I find him to be consistent. He seems to make calls consistently for both teams and seems to be consistent from game to game. I would think that having a bad(?) referee is probably preferable to having one who is inconsistent. At least with a consistent but bad referee, a player can figure out what he can or cannot get away with. With an inconsistent one, you never know what will be called and what isn't. Regarding Pierre Belanger: he used to ref at RPI a lot but I haven't seen him ref recently. Maybe he got the hint and moved out of town. He gets my vote. He is the only referee I've ever heard of to penalize a player (back in the '80s) for "leaving his feet to play the puck". Yeah, go get them Pierre. On a more positive note, I think it was a wonderful move to abandon the two referee system. There was nothing worse than having 2 refs with opposing style skating together. Then you could get a penalty called (or not) depending on where you were and the ice and which ref was watching. Of course, we've yet to see how the 1 ref 2 assistant ref setup will work!! HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.