Does not wanting to flag make you a bad marshal?

[Ubique]

Well I guess the title of this thread is pretty self explanatory. In several of the threads on here I've noticed that there seem to be a few people who believe that to be a good marshal you need to be happy flagging but is this the case and have these "good" marshals ever tried any of the other specialisations?

I ask this following a long season during which I have noticed a significant number of marshals who are unwilling to upgrade to experienced on the basis that they don't like flagging and resent being forced to do it. Does this make them bad incident marshals?

We all started marshalling to give something back to the sport we love and when numbers are low I'm pretty sure that we all accept the need to multi task but numbers are now improving so do we still need the requirement be a flaggie to upgrade? From my own perspective I'm an IO and a Specialist Marshal but absolutely hate flagging, it just bores me senseless and I get absolutely no enjoyment out of doing it. Now don't get me wrong I can, and have flagged when needed but it's not a role that would make me want to marshal.

Personally I think that flagging is a specialist task that takes time to become good at. I can even understand the logic of trainees having to learn flagging so that they can perform the duty in an emergency and so that they understand the flag role but can't the same reasoning be used to say that they should have an understanding of other specialist roles i.e pits/startline or assembly? But what I can't see is the need for someone who wants to go Track to Experienced track and stay on the incident stream of the grade to be forced to flag.

Thankfully people have started to see sense and reintroduced the flag grade but I feel it's been put back at the wrong level as now it's on a par with IO. In the old system you went Trainee - Course (Green) and then specialised as either Incident (Red) or Flag (Blue) and IO grade was denoted as either Red/Black (Incident stream IO) or Blue/Black (IO with flag grade). That system worked.

For me I'd like to see all trainees give each role a go so maybe to become a qualified marshal they could do 20 days Incident, 2 days Flag and 2 days Specialist (for trainee Specialists swap the days for Incident and Specialist above) that way they would be able to decide what role they wished to follow and if they don't want to ever flag again then they wouldn't have to.

OK so what are your views? Personally I worry that if we keep forcing people to do things that they don't enjoy we will start seeing them give up marshalling.