I was so worked up about doing a dual. I was jittery, nervous, and did not know how to react. But it is done with and in the end, there is nothing that terrible about it. It really boils down to this, you call your quadrant and the other one calls his/her quadrant. Stay within the offside lines of the team, act more like an AR than a center and basically stuff in the middle of the field either does not get called or gets called twice.
But here are the specifics. I arrived at 5:25 for a 6pm JV kickoff. I got to the field and it was everything that the guy at refblog.com always harps about. Hard barely grassy field, long and narrow, like football fields are. The other ref had emailed me earlier stating that he had a 4pm match somewhere else and was not going to show up until right at kickoff. I did not know the JV procedure, but I did collect the rosters from each team and then checked the girls in.
I started the game and about 4-5 minutes into the match, I see the other guy on the field. I yell to the ladies that there were now two whistles on the field and to play on. I had started my watch, but since there was a high school scoreboard, I let it guide me only to find out that at 2 minutes remaining, they did not count it down anymore because it is the ref's determination of when it ends, so in the first half, they probably played another minute or two because I did not know if it would end by itself when the 2 minutes were up or if I had to end it. When we got to at least 3 minutes after, I blew the whistle for the first half to end.
I got to meet the other ref, we chatted and I admitted that I had not done any matches before under this regime but he said that it just takes a little adapting and that most JV games are not really competitive, that the games everyone comes to watch is that actual high school matches and not the younger kids.
The game itself was interesting, more contact than I would have liked, but the other ref basically called nothing. I called 3 fouls in the second half and 2 in the first. I did not attempt to make all the hand signals but I did call out what I saw, for the sake of the coaches. But in the second match where I was an AR, the center only made the 'stop the clock' gesture after each goal was scored, other than that there is no stopping of the clock they said.
Back to the matches, both were very similar, the JV game was won by the local side who played more controlled soccer and started the second half by getting scored on in the first couple of minutes of the second half and then turned it around for a 2-1 win. In the second match, the home team scored in the first minute of the second half and then went on to lose 4-2.
The last impression I had was the fact that we had the whole camaraderie thing going on, with the starters getting their names called out, the whole national anthem, it really did feel like a world cup match, at least this first time. Interesting since I had never done it quite like this before.
So all in all, it is still soccer, just a little quirkier than I am used to, a little rougher than I expected and more people in the stands than just parents. Next week I do the same school but on the boys side, and I have been warned to buckle up for even a bigger ride. We'll see about that.
3 comments:
Well, every region is different when it comes to High School soccer, NFHS offers incredible leeway on how things are actually implemented.
There's a few things which I can offer in advice though. The whole "you call things in your quadrant etc." is not a good dual. Far too many officials treat a dual as two AR's with whistles, when a good one is a lead AR and a CR, and the Trail AR is missing. Yeah, you have to run a lot more to do a good dual than you would a CR or AR in a DSC game; however, I'm confident that you're in shape to do it from your posts.
That said, I've had more than my share of partners who apparently thought there were landmines laid along the halfway line like was the Korean DMZ. Really it's the trailing official that should be making the foul calls, but sadly it doesn't work that way all too often.
Hopefully you and your partner are in sync, but if your partner just isn't calling anything, still call what you can for the good of the game.
Don't be a slave to the offside line, give it up where appropriate either near your own side's goal (because it's not that hard to get most of them right slightly off the line there with the obligatory field markings), or if the score is a blowout anyway and you have to be far more worried about frustration fouls instead of a missed offside call.
JV games, especially if there's no FS team, are basically sloppy rec games (assuming your rec league is decent). You get a lot of kids that have never played soccer before, and are simply doing it as their Spring sport in your case. So yeah, some sloppy contact is expected... these aren't extremely skilled players more often than not.
It's too bad that your first game didn't have what sounds like a strong head referee. There should be some very explicit guidance on how to manage the clock, and a few other details such as the pre-game which I'm moderately stunned you weren't already provided with.
I suppose I got lucky in my first HS year, good instructors and a fantastic assignor made the experience much easier than it could have been.
At the end of the day, it's soccer of a sort, and just treat it like your first year of being a referee: you probably got some annoying games, with some slack AR's (now dual partners), but keep doing a good job and things will get better. The higher level matches, even JV at larger schools that have a FS team, aren't terribly bad soccer at least out here, but we have a lot of club players in So Cali.
You pretty much summed it up. I am happy in a certain way that I am done with my first match, and that I know what to look for in the future, but it is certainly a totally different outlook and way to call matches when you have someone else on the field that has the same authority as you have. But I agree, I need to venture off of the offside line when the play is not likely to require a offside call to help with the middle of the field because otherwise, it becomes no-mans land. Thanks for the feedback.
A How-to article on the Dual system entitled Doing Double Duty by Tom Stagliano appeared in Referee magazine in August 2006. It can be looked up (with some difficulty) through my referee in Arbiter sposrt website: https://www.arbitersports.com/MyReferee
There is a lot of detail there, but two things that I picked up that helped immediately: 1) let the play flow around you when the ball comes into your corner of the field. So on a wing attack that turns the corner, you should be about 15 yards in and 15 yards from the end line--NOT standing on the sideline. Second, on a corner, when you are the trail, you should be at about the 25 yard line, NOT at the half line.
I will make one more point... discuss the coffin corner. Who has it. If play comes off a breakaway, the lead should cross over; if the action comes off a cross, the trail should push up. At least talk about it--arguably, it should be the trails most of the time.
As you found out, most JV doesn't really require much ref presence, which is good because refs aren't trained in the dual; but is also too bad, since refs don't feel the need to master this system.
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