Another possible (partial) solution to the availability issue would be for teams to schedule matches on lower-demand nights to ease the number of officials required at the same time.
Most schools, at least the ones I'm familiar with, are on a default Tuesday/Friday game schedule, which puts a lot of demand on those two nights, leaving a lot of officials with little to do on the other three weeknights. Many teams alternate Thursday and Friday night matches for a number of reasons, which eases the demand at the end of the week, but almost everyone seems to play on Tuesday regardless, which makes it the hardest day to get three officials for everyone who wants them.
If schools could agree to stagger the game schedules a bit more--maybe alternate weeks with Tuesday/Thursday and Wednesday/Friday matches, for example, it would lower the number of officials needed on the same night and allow a smaller pool to still serve a greater number of teams in a week. I've been told that scheduling makeup games on Wednesday is easy, because there is almost certainly no shortage of officials...it's the least-used night of the week. I know that few people like to play on Monday nights...coming off a weekend without a practice to re-focus can sometimes result in some pretty sub-par perfornamces...but we could make better use of Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to spread games out and reduce single-night demand.
My advice at any rate...if you have a game you feel you really, REALLY need three officials for and aren't sure of getting them, try to reschedule it for a Wednesday night...that's your best bet.
