Seriously, it is basically mid April and I am still wearing my long sleeve kits with a couple of colors underneath to keep warm (my go to color underneath is yellow because the club I most work for uses it for their uniforms, so I end up wearing black or red as the outer color).
Rant aside, I worked 6 matches this weekend and there are three storylines I wanted to share with you. The first is a funny one. The first match this weekend was because I was at the field observing our younger core of refs and helping out. One ref was hurt and so I did his match while waiting for my 1pm match. It was a U6 match of the rec league. Loved every minute of it.
I did have a trying time with a little boy named Frank. At U6, you normally get a couple of kids that have not played soccer before and this was the case Frank. He thought soccer was football and he ran off with the ball, tucked under his arm at least three times. Once all the way to restroom area 100 yards away before his father tackled him. He also believed in causing some damage to teammates and opponents alike. He took down players left and right. I was close to actually carding the kid (only half serious) but his coach and father made it tolerable. Hopefully Frank figures out how it all works.
The second one is related to goal safety. Please make sure that the goals are anchored and/or have some sort of weight on them. We had an incident where some of the mobile goals were not really anchored well because of the rain and one of our referees checking the goal was able to tip it over with one finger. Thankfully someone was checking. Please do the same.
Finally, I worked with some referees this weekend that were interesting characters. The first was one that stated he had worked over 4,000 matches and his preference was 12-16 matches a weekend plus high school. He expected at least double the centers than ARs (so 2 centers per AR match given to him) and a minimum of 6 matches per day. More power to him but goshdarnit what a beating he takes both mentally and physically.
The second interesting ref story was one of a father/son combo where the father took his AR responsibilities very lightly and then in the center was absolutely the opposite. It certainly appeared that he did not appreciate an AR role at all. He did not run at all as an AR and ran only marginally more as a center (while still handing out plastic for relatively low level stuff).
That is all I have for today. Thanks for the emails and look forward to hearing from you all with comments, etc.
