Last Weekend's Recap

Alas, I am in training this week for my 'real' job and so updating this blog has not been priority one. But I did want to document some of the experiences from last week as there were a couple of interesting things that happened.

I did two ARs on Saturday and one center and one AR on Sunday. Let me start chronologically. On Saturday, I was scheduled to do the two ARs, for the local rec league. I was not too 'up' for it, because of the pay for these matches. The AR position paid only $14 per match (about 1 hour), was for U10 boys I and thought to myself, this is a waste of my time. I also thought that the level of play was going to be beneath me (and you will see how I had to swallow that thought later) but in the end, I had signed up and was going to do it because it was the right thing to do.

I arrived at the field about 10 minutes before kick-off (traffic getting there was absurd that afternoon) and when I arrive, I see the other two there, the Center was probably 15 if that much and the other AR was 13 years old. That only added to my thought of 'why am I doing such a rinky-dink match when I have already done more significant matches'. To top it off, the center hands me his flag and it had to be the cheapest looking flags I had ever seen. I have a set of flags of course, and they were not too expensive, maybe $10 or so. They are not professional looking, but they do look ok. These were more like sticks with colored toilet paper. Again, adding it up in my mind that this was not worth it.

To top it off, we start the match and the Center calls an indirect kick inside the penalty area right at the start of the game because of an appearant pass back to the goalie which I did not think was correct. What made it worse was that the boy taking the free kick shoots directly on goal and scores (remember it was an indirect kick) and the ref validates the goal. To be fair, I believe I was the only one who noticed. At halftime I asked him what he thought of the play and he insisted someone else touched it before going in, so at least he knew the rule, though his eyesight would need to be checked.

That first match ended 8-0 and was over 5 minutes into the match. The second match was a lot closer and right before kickoff, the referee assignor for the league stops by and says that he is going to be watching the match. I later realized that this whole deal of giving me an AR position for a match that I knew for sure was not very challenging was all a cover to see if I would take even the most trivial assignments seriously.

In the end, there were two interesting things of note in the second match that day. The first was a foul by the goalie outside of the box to an attacking player. I raised my flag but it seemed the Center shot me down. The second was a breakaway where one player was going on goal and a teammate was in front of him with just the goalie to beat. The numbnuts passed it to his teammate (in an offside position of course as the goalie was the last man) and so they blew it.

After the match, the assignor said that on the goalie foul, I should have pointed towards the side of the team making the infraction so the Center would know who to call the foul on. The other one was the fact that the offside call was spot on according to him and he saw my enthusiasm for reffing by taking a simple U10 rec league match so seriously.

So now I was offered to do an AR position this weekend for the u16 girls in a more competitive league to see how I do there. It will be interesting for sure.

Sunday's matches were great. The center match I did was a U10 boys travel match and I cannot tell you how amazed I was at the level of ball handling these boys had. The match ended 3-3 and it was so well played. The other match was an AR for the adult co-ed league. I learned in that match exactly how difficult it is to be watching your sideline up and down the whole way and at the same time, keep up with the second to last defender. I caught myself several times either out of position or barely getting to see who the ball went out on my side. That is something I am going to have to work on, for sure.

This coming weekend, I have two centers and one AR, and all are local, so hopefully, things continue to work out well. It is fun for sure and I am always looking forward to the weekend it seems.