Hi ,
We should be officiating our games for the safety and enjoyment of the players. While coaches are a component of the overall game it is the players we should focus on.
This said, coaches do have comments about what they see and they send them to Todd Maynard (league president) and me. Like I did last week I'll pass those comments on you to you as anonymously as I can. If you recognize your game, simply think back and consider some of the comments.
This week let us focus on a) foul recognition and b) improper restarts (balls that don't leave the penalty area, bad throw-ins, etc).
A hint on foul recognition: don't get so focused on the ball and the feet that you miss the upper body fouls. You will read in the comments that those were a lot of the observations from the "Directors of Substitutions", our beloved coaches! ;-)
Thanks!
Tom
From:
Sent: Monday, September 21, 2009 12:54 PM
To: president@vcys.org
Cc:
Subject: Fouls
At the last game we played, a player from another team was pushing one of our girls, was not able to stop her, and finally used both hands to physically push her onto the ground. A foul was called, we got a penalty shot, etc...I know soccer is a contact sport... My question is this: I would have normally thought that this would mean a yellow card is handed out. Are yellow cards handed out? If so, what should a coach do once a yellow card is given to one of their players? The coach from the other team did not reprimand this girl, she has done this in the past, (last year), she has told our players that she hates their guts, etc... By the coach not talking to her, he is condoning the behavior and she will continue to do what she did. I realize that we did get a penalty shot, but at what point is this player going to be stopped? Do we just tell our girls to deal with it? I usually ask this question every year. This foul and another, (see below) was the worst I have seen, as far as blatant pushing by a player, in an attempt to stop another player from scoring. Thanks for your time- Kristi
The other foul was a direct elbow to the face.
From: Sent: Monday, September 21, 2009 9:55 AM To: president@vcys.org Subject: today's ref The referee we had today did a pretty good job. She gave them a little latitude, let some inadvertent handballs go, gave each team 1 retry for a bad throwin. She did call a couple of fouls in more blatant cases. Our only complaint was that she allowed us a substitution on one ball out of touch, but restarted before we completed the substitution. In general, a little tentative, but not bad at all if this is just her first or second game. A quick comment - I still feel bad about the penalty kick from the week before against Jayden. It is my understanding of the rule that she is not allowed to move off the line, but I didn't see her move early, so it couldn't have been that bad. That would have been a good one to let go in Div 6. From: Sent: Monday, September 21, 2009 10:30 AM To: referees@vcys.orgSubject: Referee Tom, I apologize, for an out burst towards your ref on Sat, the other team was being very aggressive elbows to the head, tripping, and I am not being one sided as I know a couple of my girls were getting very frustrated that he was not calling anything, so then they started to respond by pushing aggressively, I did my best to calm them down, by pulling them out. |
