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.
