School of Excellece exercises

Today I am going to focus on a couple of exercises that were run at School of Excellence that made me think about how to better educate and motivate referees, especially those that were reluctant to learn a few new things.

The exercises that stuck with me were these:

-Left Hand/Right hand
-Sprint/color
-The diagonal

These are my names as I don't recall what they really were. Someone who has been to a national camp or somewhere else where these were run can probably give the real names, but I will describe them.

Left hand/Right hand was an exercise run on half a field, where lead AR and center ref have to work together to communicate what exactly the restart needs to be. Essentially the ball is played into an area close to the goal and some "players" try to screen the center and the AR from what is going on. What the center and the AR have to pay attention to is with what hand does the ball get bounced with by the person holding the ball (while the other players are trying to screen your view, by huddling close to the person holding the ball, or by getting in the line of sight). If the ball is bounced with the left hand, then it is a foul in favor of the attacking team. If it is bounced with the right hand, it is a foul in favor of the defending team.

Quite complicated because you have to look at many criteria, like where the ball was bounced with the left and right hand, as a left hand bounce inside the box is a PK and outside is a free kick. You have to be able to quickly look at your AR to see if they have any info that you don't have and pass that info along. It took me a couple of tries before I understood what the instructors were looking for but it was a fun exercise.

The second one was another disassociation type drill. You had to concentrate on doing jogs, sidesteps and other criteria until a color was shown, then you had to sprint to the corner of the color shown. You essentially jogged and sidestepped back and forth and when the time to sprint came, you were shown a color (yellow, black, green and pink) and that determined what corner of the sprint area you ran to. Again, you are focusing on one thing until you must focus on another.

Finally the diagonal is something that I touched on last time I had my SOE class and that was to mirror your two ARs and try to set up that triangle as best you can. So if AR1 ran up the Y axis if you will, you had to run alongside with him and still try to maintain your visual with your X axis AR. One minute of that running back and forth was brutal and my legs were on fire when I ran it. For starters, I would recommend 30 seconds instead of a minute.

And then train for your running test. I had to run the State 6 test with a time of 35 seconds for the run and a walk of 40 seconds. It was harder than I thought it would be, but I passed fortunately. And it got me to thinking (again) on how much easier things would be if I also ran more during the week instead of mostly on weekends. Ah well, someday, right?