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In an odd twist of fate, I found myself in a soccer referee
class, taking the course through my local soccer association. For the uninitiated, it's a
rather daunting proposition to sit for three, then eight, then four hours and listen to
someone talk about the intricacies of how to raise a flag when running lines, and how to
avoid taking a punch from an irate player. Actually, I am being unfair. They also
talked about hygiene. I kid you not.
It wasn't all bad. I got a Y2K copy of the Laws of the Game,
and a neat badge for nailing 88 out of a 100 questions on the final, top of the class.
Duh, my wife said.
What bothers me is how inefficient it was. It was nice to
chat with three very experienced referees about how to referee a game. A couple of them
regularly plied their trade in indoor and outdoor professional soccer, and did their best
to impart what cannot be taught; a feel for the game, and a reasonable grasp of common
sense as it applies to soccer. But like most everything in life, it needs to be improved.
The best part about making the referee indoctrination process
better is that improvement would be cheap. The
referee training process today could be improved for pennies per referee because
interactive technology is so cheap. The video, DVD, and computer resources that would make
giving and taking the class better are extremely cheap and efficient.
Before I go on, let me point out that there is no replacement
for experience. You are not a good referee until you've done your first hundred games,
maybe first two hundred. But there is no better way to enrich the pool of local referees
than improve the logistics of giving a course, and improve the content for those taking
it. If you reduce the barriers to becoming a referee, maybe there wouldn't be a such a
chronic shortage of them. I presume that one of the principle reasons that associations
never have enough is the in-class time requirement, that parents with kids or lawyers that
work 14 hours a day during the week cannot fathom. Marriage preparation classes take less
time! If the class time was less but the instruction was better, the situation would
improve.
First, use videotapes of games to illustrate all the points
of the game. Everyone over 8 years old has a TV and video player, so there are not too
many associations that can't come up with one for a class. Use edited game footage
with pauses built into the tape to illustrate offside, placement of the wall, technical
fouls and penal fouls. Sure it's not perfect, but it's a lot more like the real thing than
a drawing. After the second day of class, I flipped on a Serie A game at home. Within ten
minutes I had seen a complicated off-side call that we had discussed at length in the
class. Several people had difficulty visualizing the call with the drawing. But access to
a video clip could easily illustrate it. In this case, the ball was played laterally to a
player that, when the ball was struck, was in an offside position. He tried to come back
to the ball and into an onside position, and the ref was good enough to see it. Bravo! I
said, and I spent the rest of game observing where the referee placed himself through the
match, how he played the advantage rule, and I would guess the restart after each foul,
and take a stab at what he thought the foul was. If the Federation hired one intern to
review the entire 2000 MLS season on tape, that intern could compile about 10 different
training tapes/DVD's,which could be reproduced once for every state association in the
country, which could then produce them as needed.
Second, put practice questions on the Internet. Most of the
things you need to learn are simply "what do you do when..." and the answers are
red card, yellow card, direct free kick, indirect free kick, send off, offside, throw in,
and dropped ball. FIFA has a practice exam included in their Laws of the Game web site,
and that was as helpful as anything that we did in the actual class. Problem is, I found
that on my own long ago, and it was not mentioned in the class. Learning what the proper
restart is after all events is critical, but it's not something you learn without some
repetition. Several people did not pass the exam we took, simply because they had not been
asked enough times, "what do you do when?" With a few hundred tries in a couple
of hours, they would know it. They would know it better and more completely without the
need to be in a class for such a long time. Anyone
with access to a computer should be able to master 90 percent of the material in two
sessions of two hours in front of a computer.
If the Federation doesn't want to put it on the Internet,
CD-rom blank discs are a buck each. Charge everyone two dollars extra for the class, and
they can prepare with the CD before they take the exam. New referees would get the added
advantage of having the disc at home that they could use to refresh their memory anytime
after the actual class, with a quick one-hour tour-de-force the night before a game, just
to bring it back to mind.
Finally, the best reason for integrating technology into the
process is to stem the number one reason why referees quit the job: parents (and coaches)
that don't know what they are talking about that cannot keep their mouths shut. If
the Federation is really serious about improving parent conduct, then they need to be
serious about educating all the players and all the parents about the Laws of the Game. I
would like nothing better than to force one parent of every U-12 player in America to
suffer through and pass a referee's exam before their child can compete on a
competitive league team. But it's a totally unreasonable demand when the class is 18 hours
in a class-room. But if you made them sit and watch a 30 minute video followed by a 50
question exam, the Federation might make some progress on the parent conduct issue.
The parents (and coaches) don't have to actually take the
exam. It's the age of that dreadful millionaire show, right? Create a video that shows
them the question, and provides the answers one at a time on the screen. After a
five second pause, you take away the incorrect answers one at a time until you have the
correct one. Fifty questions in 25 minutes. The whole process took an hour, and now the
local associations might not have to resort to Silent Saturday. Instead, the associations
have parents that understand the offside rule, and have an appreciation for the job of
referee.
In any case, I am soon to begin the real training of being a
referee, by actually having to work some games. Maybe I'll ask for the autograph of
the first player I book.
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