My First Center

Tomorrow I will be doing my first center right before my son's game. It is a U9 Girls game. I tried to choose one that was relatively innocent and that was as close as I could find as the local rec league does not allow new refs to work the first weekend of their season (I am not sure why, though).

So even though I should be ok, I am a little bit nervous, as it will be my first game. I will have 2-3 games this weekend as a center but I should be ok, none of them are finals or even to the point where a score is kept. Once I have the initial jitters out of the way, I think it will be ok. My next challenge will be when I ref for the adult league sometime in the next two weeks.

This leads me to the next part of my post, the whole aspect of getting assignments. It boggles the mind how complex this must be. I am signed up in some way, shape or form, to officiate for six different leagues. There is the adult league that has a co-ed league and a women's only league. They send emails saying these are our games, and you email them back with the ones that you want to work. This system is simple enough.

There are two rec leagues that I am associated with, the one that is right where I live and one that is one county over. One of them requires that you tell them your availability before the season starts and they give you your list of games for the whole season right before the first weekend of the season. They have a somewhat petty rule that new refs cannot work the first weekend, so tomorrow morning we all have a meeting with them but I will not be working with them till next weekend. Their system is the poorest of all as it becomes quite inflexible. My thinking is that I will work this first season with them and then stop, but then again, my daughter plays in the league and it is easier to ref for them, for sure.

The other rec league as well as the two travel leagues that I am associated with use a site called thearbiter.net. This site is kind of an Outlook on steriods. Not very intuative, and I work in IT for a living. Still, one of the assignors was kind enough to give me a step-by-step guide, and I was able to schedule and "open" the days and times I wanted to work and theoretically, the assignors will then give you games based on your availability.

Above I say theoretically, because one of the travel leagues where I am associated with sent out an email stating that there were games with no referees and to please check them out and take the ones you wanted to work. When I opened the email, I could not believe the number of games with no ref. For tomorrow Saturday, the list was at least 35 matches long and Sunday's list was even worse. One of the games listed was my son's game, which I would rather not ref. But I did get the game prior and the game right after since I was already going to be there.

After this weekend, I hope to give a list of where I went to get games and what strategies I used to get on all these lists. There were a couple of jerks that I met along the way, and I hope to go into that as well, but for now, wish me luck for this weekend and hope those 9 year old girls don't give me a run for the money ($35).