Coaches aren't the only ones using videotape of women's college basketball games to evaluate performance. Women's basketball officials view play after play, too.

For the first time in NCAA history, basketball referees can log onto the Association's Web site (www.ncaa.org) to see examples of how certain plays should be called and what points of emphasis to focus on.

Several conferences also have implemented the use of video clips with the common goal of developing consistency in the field of officiating.

Marcy Weston, the national coordinator of women's basketball officiating, selects which plays will be displayed on the NCAA Web site. The project is in a pilot stage with a sample of plays having been posted in December and again in January. In the future, Weston hopes to post examples every week, since she sees this as a valuable learning tool that will have more impact as more video clips are made available.

"We came up with some ideas about how we could do a better job of educating all of the officials in the country," said Weston, a senior associate athletics director and senior woman administrator at Central Michigan University. "Our charge is for Division I, but we get a lot of people from Divisions II and III as well. We got on it in the summer and decided we could post on the NCAA Web site and give the address to all of the officials in the country so they could all be seeing the same thing."

Men's basketball officials can also log onto the NCAA Web site to view calls. This is the first year the digital videos have been available to them via the Association's site.

"You'd be surprised the amount of time officials put into this type of self-evaluation," said veteran men's basketball official Ed Hightower. "They look at their game films and get feedback from their supervisor. Hank Nichols (the men's basketball officiating coordinator) does a great job. I don't know how he does his job. He has so many games he has to watch and so many people who he's attempting to give feedback to. The NCAA has evolved so greatly over the years with the evaluation program it has in place."

Among the goals for the venture is to mitigate regional differences in the way games are called. To that end, the Big Ten Conference, Conference USA, the Mid-Continent Conference and the Horizon League have created the Women's Basketball Officiating Consortium (WBOC), which combines examples of calls that can be viewed by referees.

"I'm on the Web site checking for new plays every day," said Lisa Mattingly, who has worked the last six Women's Final Fours, including the last four championship games. "Once I download them all, I have them on my desktop. That way I can reference them on my laptop in pregame."

The WBOC also provides referees the opportunity to make comments on the examples displayed so the official coordinators receive feedback.

"They usually have a one-sentence blurb on each play letting you know if it was a good call or not," Mattingly said. "It will say things like, 'This was good teamwork,' or whatever. We can then respond if we so desire. They show you good no calls or they'll say, 'Good patience on this,' or they might say, 'Maybe you should've been in better position and you might not have made the same call.' Right now there are probably more than 40 clips."

This isn't available yet on the NCAA site, but Weston has heard positive responses from officials.

Since 1986, Weston has been the lead clinician at a series of five clinics for officials every October that detail rules changes and points of emphasis for the coming season.

"Officials love to see tape of what you want them to do," said Weston, who officiated the 1982 and 1984 women's championship games. "It's so much easier to see it visually than it is to just hear about it and have to see it in your mind's eye. They just love the fact we're showing them video clips periodically. They see that tape and can watch it a dozen times and want to see something new. We try to give them variety and different plays."

One of the main points of emphasis this year in women's basketball involves displacement of players in the post, rebounding, screening and cutting. Handchecking on the perimeter also is a focus area in the game.

"You can see the play instead of it being described," said Sally Bell, who has 14 Women's Final Fours on her resume. "You can see if the contact is a foul or if the player is re-routing or impeding someone. It's good to see it in the context of a play rather than a still snapshot in your mind."

While the technological advances are helpful, Weston believes it can be truly beneficial with communication between the coordinators and those who actually are calling the games.

"If you just watch the video in a vacuum and never talk to anyone about it, you can learn, but it's better to interact with other officials about plays," Weston said. "This creates conversations among officials. I'll have people call me, saying a call could have gone either way. Education using video game clips is the way to go. We're certain it will benefit our officiating improvement program."

For now, the officials just want the pictures to keep rolling.

"I can sit at a clinic and just watch video tape," Mattingly said. "The more you can see, the better. It's like getting on the court -- the more plays you can see, the bigger your rolodex of plays."