BCSRA Head Referee Program Proposal

BCSRA Head Referee Program ProposalJuly 2, 2012

June 30, 2012: meeting with Nick and Elvio to discuss Head Referee requests and development of a program to provide education materials through BCSRA.

From Nick's meeting with the head referees this is the list of things that they would like to see, in the order the Nick presented them:

1. A PowerPoint presentation for teaching referees about the small sided game;

2. Materials to provide four education sessions per year;

3. BCSRA instructors to attend and teach four sessions per year for the Head Referees;

4. Do a clinic on use of referee teaching materials;

5. Help set up a mentor training program, including practical tips and check sheets;

6. Guideline or outline on how to do "fly by" assessments; and

7. Online meetings for Head Referees for discussion and distribution of information.

General discussion on what is possible, what our goals should be and how we should address these. Agreement that all of these items, together, represent too much for us to take on at one time. It will be very important for BCSRA to prove that when we promise something we actually deliver (and preferably we over deliver) on the materials, which are of good quality and meet the needs of the Head Referees. Accordingly, we can only take on what we can actually deliver.

Although a side benefit of providing some or all of the above items for Head Referees will be to gain new members for BCSRA, once they see that there is an advantage to them and their member referees in belonging, the main goal is to ensure that refereeing throughout the province increases in its professionalism and becomes both more enjoyable an experience and technically a better experience for all involved, i.e. Raising the level of this beautiful game.

First Year Program

Our conclusion on the items which we think we could deliver for the fall season, a bit of a description and some indication of who would do what:

A. PowerPoint presentation for teaching the small sided game:

- Nick indicated he should be able to put this together, particularly as he wrote the syllabus for small sided referees;

- This would cover the basics and allow Head Referees to utilize the presentation in teaching their candidates about the small sided game.

B. Materials for four education sessions per year:

- the idea is to provide these on a DVD to include the PowerPoint presentation, notes on using the PowerPoint presentation including presenters notes for various slides, example clips that are on the DVD and are already built into the PowerPoint slides in the appropriate locations so that there is no need to exit the PowerPoint presentation, rather the presenter just needs to click on the video clip or link built into the slide and the clip will play;

- we want to be able to fit this on a single DVD in order that they are easily reproduced and easily distributed by mail to Head Referees;

- The idea is that the DVD will contain the complete presentation [if there is room then more than one presentation];

- we considered the list of available presentations already prepared in order to select four for the first group that would be used with Head Referees and came up with the following:

(a) Advantage: Bill McNaughton to produce this program;

(b) Offside: Bill McNaughton to produce this program;

(c) Confident or Week: Nick Hawley to produce this presentation;

(d) Misconduct: Nick Hawley to produce this presentation.

- We are expecting that Elvio will assist in providing video clips and with production of the DVDs;

- one of the key items is getting the clips to work from the PowerPoint (so no need to stop, exit, open a new program, find and run the clip, stop, go back to the PowerPoint, etc.) and we may need some help from a PowerPoint expert to ensure this works or we asking for problems [I have no idea why some of my clips will work from the PowerPoint and others will not]

C. Online meeting or webinar for Head Referees:

- this would be an initial meeting to introduce our program, advise them that we have the small sided PowerPoint and four prepared education sessions, on DVDs, ready to send to them;

- this initial call would have to explain the "rules" that we are providing them with a series of information items rather than a free for all discussion on this webinar as we are anticipating that there may be as many as 45 Head Referees;

- we would use this initial call to explain how the materials on the education DVDs work, what they will need to do when they get them in [for example: downloading the latest VLC media player, if including it on the DVD means that we run out of room.] , and who to contact if they have questions.- We might also encourage a discussion him on other items, including those mentioned below in the Second Priority section;

-we expect there may be some technical issues utilizing a computer and a telephone line;

- we would also encourage them to provide us with the e-mail addresses of their referees in order that we could send them information about the BCSRA website and Facebook page; We would encourage them to use the website and the Facebook page for ongoing discussion of referee related items;

- We are hoping that Laurie Miller will be able to assist in setting up the webinar. We anticipate that it will take two people to run it, given the number of potential attendees in order that questions can be dealt with in an orderly fashion. I anticipate it would be useful to have Laurie, Nick, Elvio and Bill (or as many as possible) together in one location to do this webinar.

Second Priority Items

The next step would be to look at the following items:

D. A clinic on the use of the referee education materials:

- Head Referees indicated they need some help to ensure that the people that will be making presentations in local clubs know how to do it, so this would be a hands on explanation session to take those people through one, or two, of the education DVDs indicating how they would make the presentation, and providing them with tips on handling issues that may arise;

- We are anticipating the "presenters" will not, in many cases, be BCSA instructors and so may need some assistance;

- This could be done as a session using another webinar, with the head referees bringing their presenters into the webinar with them utilizing just one computer for each head referee (in other words, these people would be grouped together).

E. BCSRA instructors to attend and teach the four sessions per year:

- We do not have enough people to do this. We might be able to do a few of these, but there is no way to do them around the entire province.

F. Mentor program set up and practical training:

- The idea would be to draw on our experience with the NorthShore and the mentor program that was set up there under Patrick Li;

- We expect that mentors would take the BCSAtraining and this would be an additional session to assist them with practical issues that arise when actually trying to make the mentoring program work

-we should be able to provide some check sheets and other materials;

- ideally we would do this with mentors once the Head Referee has set up their program and done a couple of weeks of mentoring so that they all have questions that we can help to answer and will understand the practical points that we are trying to make.

G.Guideline or outline on how to do "fly by" assessments

-Nick has some experience doing these with John Barrett;

- The key is to spend only 10 min. at each field looking for three items: Does the referee will have proper kit?; Is the referee running?; is the referee making the obvious calls?

- Explaining this to Head Referees would likely take a further webinar or online session. It might be possible to set up some information that they can take from the website or the Facebook page.

[A thought I did not express at our meeting: would we be able to set up a special page on the website for Head Referees that only they could access by a codewe provide thereby having a location where we could post materials for them?]

Conclusion & Implementation

That was what we discussed. Now we need to look at getting on with actually doing it. Let me know if you have comments or changes. We also need to discuss a timeline for when we would actually try and implement this.

Bill