Yes, that would be my suggestion to them. The past few years they actually started having a preseason ref meeting instead of just a preseason team manager meeting, but they do then separately rather than together. If they did them together, then there could be some direct dialogue and questions/answers for refs and managers to interact
HSGV D-1 Regional Semifinal (so round of 16 for the state championship) last night. I'm AR1. 0-0 game in the second half. There's a shot on goal and I'm sprinting toward it. I'm probably 8 yards out when the shot hits the crossbar and deflects down, hits the ground, back up to the crossbar, back down to ground, and the keeper finally gets a hand on it to pull it back away from goal. I have made it to the goal line during this bouncing. As far as I can tell, the ball never got all of the way over the line, so I'm emphatically signaling no goal because I know we need to sell this one way or another. Dad in the stands off that goal line (which is a sort of terrace that's set 10-12 feet above field level) starts screaming that I screwed it up, that it was a goal, that I'm horrible. He peppers his comments liberally with F-bombs. When the ball next goes out of play, I buzz the CR to let him know to stop the clock and wait. I approached the field coordinator and let him know that that guy up there in the red pants has to go. We'll wait. They start to head that way and Mr. Red Pants departs from the back of the terrace before they can get up there. I muttered something to the home coach, who thanks me and says that he wishes I had tossed that parent earlier. We restart the game, and Mr. Red Pants re-appears in another corner of the stadium. At the next ball out of play, CR stops the clock again and indicates to the host coordinator that Mr. Red Pants hasn't left and he needs to go. This time, they get Mr. Red Pants to leave the stadium gate. A bit later, we do see him along the fence outside the stadium, but CR says that since he's outside the fence, he's not our problem anymore. Game goes to OT 0-0. In the first OT, a midfielder from Red Pant's school under pressure at midfield plays it back towards her own goal line. Her keeper thinks it came from an opponent and lets it roll harmlessly over the goal line, for a CK, when she could easily have stopped it and played it out. Opponents score on a very nice header off the CK. Game ends 1-0. I thoroughly expected Mr. Red Pants to be waiting for us in the parking lot, and I made sure we left as a crew, but he was gone by then.
whew, I had the same situation a few years ago when the idiot who was removed waited in the parking lot and then followed me to my car and I had to threaten to call the police before he finally backed away. Funny thing is that he told me that I used to be a good and capable referee, but no longer...guess I failed his "assessment".
we have 12 schools in the country...exactly one has a site administrator which will offer that for you.
I feel like if you’re expecting people to be waiting for you in the parking lot, you should be calling the police before leaving the field
nah, it's perfectly fine for anyone to still be on the school grounds, but once he approaches me after being removed from the stadium, then I reach for my phone. In this case I let him give me his "assessment" and told him to back away or my fingers will dial. Luckily, he did comply.
Our state high school association mandates that the host school offer the officials an escort to their cars. In the real world, that rarely happens. Sometimes there is a game administrator, but they tell you before the game, "I'm also covering the volleyball game in the gym, so I won't be out here the whole time." That always turns into being out there none of the time. My wife taught high school and I asked her why they need an administrator at a volleyball game. (Our state has had one ejection in girls volleyball in ten years) She told me, which I have since confirmed with an AD, it's the boys from the host school who come to the volleyball game and make loud sexually harassing comments about the visiting team's players in their very short volleyball shorts. Sometimes the boys have to be shown where the door is.
oh yeah, I had a very similar incident at a JV girls soccer match, the home team varsity boys were making snorting pig noises at this one particular individual playing on the the away team...stopped the match and waited for the home school game administrator to show up and escort the entire team to where the parking lot is located.
One of my distinct memories was a JV2 girls game at a junior high. Obviously, very informal. Down towards the penalty area, on the same side as the teams, there is a group of about six boys. I hear them making comments about the bodies of the girls on the other team and, IIRC, some of the girls on their school's team. This is not acceptable. At a stoppage, I went to the host school's coach and told her what I'd heard, giving her the opportunity to deal with the boys. She ordered them to leave the area, in no uncertain terms. She didn't have to say anything to me, but I could tell that she had enjoyed doing that.
José Mourinho files European court complaint over sanctions at Fenerbahce - ESPN The complaint, published earlier this week, claimed Mourinho's right to freedom of expression was infringed when in November 2024 when he was given a one-match ban and fined 900,000 Turkish lira ($26,200) by the Turkish Football Federation (TFF) for questioning the impartiality of referees and other match officials.
So do referees have the right to freedom of expression to question player fitness? game tactics? coaching decisions?
haha...hey #9 not sure exactly how you just missed that sitter...but maybe you should spend some more time on the practice pitch and less time in the pub.
Man.... Did you really just kick the ball out of bounds AGAIN??? My favorite that I heard on the field before "Shank-opotamus!"
Unfortunately I spoke too soon with this. I forgot that they have two weeks of playoffs, this week and next week. I had 4 games today and gave 11 yellows, one of which was a 2CT for my only red card of the year. And in one of the open division games where I gave three cards at 10’, 12’ and 13’ (2 SPA, UB-holding) to stop what I could tell was heating up, and it did for the first half, there were STILL two near confrontations in the late second half from players getting pissed at each other. I was actually hanging around card count with other refs for the season. After today, I have 27 and second has 13. I just don't know. The cards come with the 10 minute sin bin, so using these calms the hotheads down. It almost always works. This is just adult recreational, so my 1, 2, 3 highest priorities are player safety. I'll call things as fouls or cards that I wouldn't at competitive play because one little thing can cause these games to fly off the handle so I want to keep them in control. I've seen the refs who just "warn" all the time and it goes to hell. Maybe managers can tell me if my methods are garbage. Maybe the feedback will just be "fewer cards, and we don't need SPA at this level", and then I'll do that, and my games will go to crap again like always.
How about "hey, would you guys mind connecting more than two passes so I can have good positioning and stop running back and forth"
“Hey, AR, he was off!” “No, your offside trap sucked. Tell your right back on the far side he did a terrible job of stepping up when you did.” OK, I’ve never said that out loud. But I’ve said it a lot in my head.
Don't know why I didn't think of this sooner to add in here but the post in the other thread regarding chasing down the ball got me thinking about two scenarios, same field. Tournament play with a "sanctioned ball". Only one ball per field was given and refs were responsible for holding onto the ball at the end of the previous match. (You can already maybe see where this is headed.) The particular field I was assigned for the day had a walking track about 3 yards wide behind one goal, maybe about 10 yards beyond the goal itself. Then a space of a lawn mower width and there was a 7' tall fence between the park and the neighbors back yards, of course, with no gate in the fence. Ball went over the fence at least 6 times that day. We had to start using "team balls" or the match wasn't going to finish. In between matches, when it became evident no one was going to retrieve the official ball, I climbed the fence. They had some arborvitaes/leyland cypress looking trees I had to shake around to find it. In the process I found two other balls lodged in the trees. Next one was parent related. I was AR2 as I usually don't mind being on the parent's side to keep a younger ref from having to deal with them. I don't remember the circumstances of how one team came to be up by a single goal towards the end of the match but they were. I do recall that up to that point the game was pretty chill. The down by one goal team was really applying the pressure in possession in the attacking end but the up by a goal team was routinely clearing the ball over the touchline. After first it was just rolling out after tackles or just getting toed away. As it went on the defending team got more and more aggressive with the clearing to the point it was requiring a little walk to go retrieve the ball each time. Parents are starting to get testy about it (because naturally the down by one parents are on the end with me). "They are time wasting kicking it that far!" CR is handling it decent by saying there is nothing in The Laws about how far they can clear it out, he is going to add time, yada yada. CR finally blows it final and parents are livid that not enough time has been added in their estimation. Coaches are surprisingly cool about it. I found out later these two particular teams hate one another. Same club but they are from different locations in the state. Separated by maybe 40-50 miles.
Smashdn, that's how I got started refereeing! I was coaching my son's U-little team and, one day, went to my older daughter's team's game after my son's. I wasn't the coach of her team. I had no training as a referee or even read the book. No referee showed up for the game and all of the U-14 girls games were solo in those days. It happened that I was wearing dark pants and a black hoodie that day, so the other team's coach said, "Well, he's the referee" pointing to me. So I was refereeing my daughter's game. They were down 1-0, late in the game, but attacking. A defender intercepts a pass and hoofs the ball far, far away, over a mound next to the field. It happened that I had written the line up for my son's game on a piece of yellow notebook paper. I pulled out the paper and cautioned the defender. I, sort of, added time for the time lost while retrieving the only game ball. After the game, the other coach started complaining that his player, who turned out to also be his daughter, shouldn't be cautioned for that. Our coach then starts arguing with him and I just stand there listening to them. Meanwhile, the other team's assistant coach comes around behind them and tells me, "Good game!" I don't remember if I even had rosters and the idea of reporting the score or a caution to someone never occurred to me. As I'm waiting for our team to get ready to leave, a coach from another field comes up and asks, "Do you have to go someplace right away?" There was no ref for his U-14 boys game, either. My wife had driven separately to the game, so I stayed and did that game, too. I later decided that I was a better referee than a coach, so I got legal with USSF and started for real. The guy who taught my entry level class was the high school state rules interpreter and he recruited me and the other adult in the class to referee high school that fall. He became a friend and mentor and I succeeded him as SRI.
This past weekend I had a game where genuinely every single color of referee uniform was being used by someone during the game The teams were black/yellow and blue, so that eliminates three colors. One teams keepers wore green, fourth color eliminated. One team had a keeper in red, and their other keeper had pink. So if we really wanted to say “don’t match the players or keepers”, it was literally impossible.
I am in the middle of having to buy some GK jerseys for the MS team I am coaching. KY has lime green and black striped Ref jerseys so that is not an issue but I have been racking my brain trying to pick two colors that don't clash with any other school's home jerseys and likely won't be the same color as the other team's keeper. Thinking traditional kelly green (which I am sure the girls won't like) and pink. My keepers will wear the same color during the game.
If your middle school team is playing by NFHS rules, your opponents should be wearing white when they visit your school. Anyway, green and pink are pretty much standard when it comes to goalkeeper jerseys. A few years ago, NCAA adopted highlighter yellow, orange, and purple for referee jerseys colors because they found that those clashed the least with team jerseys. You might try those.
OK, just curious, why did you caution the defender? I've played soccer my entire life, coached, and even reffed for a little while and have never been told that I/my team was not allowed to kick the ball 'far' out of bounds.
Remember the part about my not ever having read the Laws of the Game, much less having attended a referee training class? At that moment, though, I felt it was deliberate time wasting and therefore unsporting.