USSF-logo cell phone holder with lanyard: http://www.officialsports.com/Cell-Phone-Holder/dp/B007JVX9I8 I'm glad to know we're finally officially authorized to carry our phones on the pitch. Now I can just ring up that recalcitrant AR and say "Keep your eyes on the match!" Who needs Reftalk?
and you could use your phone's camera to take a picture of the players you caution/send off for identification. Or shoot video of mass confrontations.
Don't be silly: it's so the AR can point his cell phone video camera at the goal so that he can show it to the R to decide if the ball crossed the goal line.
You guys have it all wrong - it's so we can take pictures of good-looking soccer moms as AR2! Quick, what was the over/under on dragging this thread down? Was it 4 posts?
In all seriousness, I try to remember to keep my cell phone in my back pocket when I'm AR. I had an incident last year where I wish I had it in a case involving referee assault and I would have liked to have taken a picture of the offender for the police report.
I once used my phone to record how many miles I ran during a game. It was interesting, so I got myself one of those Garmin watches to keep track of it.
There was a report here in Michigan that an AR had been dismissed from a tournament for texting from the line. Yowza! Last night, I did a line on an O40M game (grey-haired juveniles behaving very, very badly). I had left my Garmin plugged in at home, and my backup watch was broken, so I used my cell phone as a timer. I made it clear that when I was checking it during the match (after goals, cautions, et c) it was only to get the time and not to check on texts....
I'd be afraid of falling on my rear and breaking it! We've all taken a tumble a time or two I suspect as AR's.
I awlays keep mine in my back pocket (ringer off), did it once when I had nowhere good to leave it, and kept doing it for the just-in-case scenario that we all hope will never happen . . . but then, mine is an old dumb phone, and if I fell on it I'd have an excuse to upgrade . . .
When we have the potential for storms I keep it in a plastic baggie with the weather radar turned on.
One of our referees has used "technology" for years! When a player complains about a violation, he points to his watch and says: "just a minute, let me check the replay"....and looks at his watch for a few seconds....and then: "yes, I've looked at it again: it WAS a foul!"....players usually laugh and get on with the game... try it sometime: it works....
I have a radar app that can show lightning strikes (if you to subscribe to AllisonHouse). Very handy for mid-week games where it's just you and the teams with no admins.
If you have an iPhone and live in the US, get ForeFlight. It's free and requires no subscriptions to get all kinds of useful weather information. I use it professionally (as an aviator, that is) and find that it can also be quite helpful avocationally (on the soccer pitch).
Also, starting this month most new smartphones will automatically send you urgent weather alerts (with tornado, tsunami, extreme winds, and a few others but not severe thunderstorm warnings) from the NWS. Its called CMAS (Commerical Mobile Alert System) and all of the major providers have signed up with the government. It includes three types of warnings. Weather alerts, amber alerts, and presidential alerts (national emergencies). You can opt out of the weather and amber alerts but not presidential. I'd assume within a few years almost all phones will be CMAS capable. On a side note, hopefully this will lead to the extinction of weather sirens. Its the 21st century. We need to move past WWII tech for alerting people.
Storm sirens save lives. Not everyone in the US has a smartphone or even cell coverage. Furthermore, not everyone with a smartphone carries it with them at all times.