3/14/2009 - 3/15/2009 Savannah St. Patrick's Day Rugby Tournament

All throughout the tournament, games with 25 minute halves were played.

Western Suburbs 21 - 0 Vice Presidents XV

The referee for this game failed to show in time (8 AM), so I opted to take the first game of the day for him. Western Suburbs came down from the Potomac area, I believe they are a D2 men's club. The "Vice President's XV" was a team formed of military players...primarily from Fort Bragg (I recognized many of them), it was the social (B) side for the "President's XV," a team similarly comprised of army and marine ruggers.

XROXXs 17 - 14 Drunken Monkeys

Going into this game I thought it was going to be a total slopfest as both teams described themselves as extremely social. The XROXX were the lowest level team entered from the Savannah Rugby Club and the Drunken Monkeys were the lowest entered from Cincinnati. The game, however, turned out to be the most entertaining game I refereed all weekend, for competitiveness and demonstrated skill level. I had a referee coach watching this game and he had some very helpful pointers for controlling players and letting them know how you want the game to go having seen part of my previous game (Presidents, Western Suburbs)

• Lineouts: Mark the tunnel on the 5, tell the players the gap, how to keep it, and not to cross the line of touch.
• Scrums: Make the players get square, don't let them engage until they do.
• Scrums: Tell scrumhalves that the ball must be put in immediately after engagement, a delay for cadence will not be tolerated. This time tends to only lead to more front row problems than positive play.

These tips basically lead to me taking more time to specifically establish my presence and control over these areas of the game, and this lead to me having much more control than the first game. My ankle also happened to feel better in this game, not causing me any problems. The referee coach actually said I looked very quick (maybe the social level of teams helped there).

University of Northern Florida 22 - 14 Happy Valley (Pennsylvania)

Probably the highest level game I had all weekend. Unfortunately the most significant thing I remember from this match is this incredibly drunk UNF fan questioning every single call I made. Usually I can tune these distractions out, but considering the substantial audience and the volume this guy was managing to achieve, it really got to me. I unfortunately can't recall any significant refereeing developments, but the most interesting moment from the game came when the athletic Happy Valley fullback took it upon himself to sprint (he was quick) from sideline to sideline, trying to get a break, presumably since he had not seen much ball yet and was not yet tired. At any rate, no ruck/maul formed as he moved from one side of the field to the other and he was eventually tackled. While being tackled he tried to offload, only his offload was not good, it was a long stray pass about 10 meters backwards......where the recovering UNF scrumahlf was lurking, the ball landed in his lap, and with about 10 meters on everyone else he turned around and ran about 70 meters for a try, I was lucky to get within the 22 meter line when he scored.

NCSU 14 - 0 University of Minnesota

My Alma Mater, NC State University, had attended this tournament. This was one of my personal motivations for flying down to referee the tournametnt as the opportunity for me to go and cause ruckus with many of my old college buddies was hard to pass up. At any rate, NCSU and minnesota had teams cancel games on them in their respective pools, so a scratch match was organized between the two. Unfortunately no referee was assigned....I had just finished the UNF game on the field beside theirs, and volunteered to do the game. Unfortunately, the Minnesota team turned out to be one of the worst rugby teams I have ever refereed. Their only interest seemed to be making dangerous tackles, protesting every call, and provoking NC State players. Now this is even after the Minnesota team borrowed a couple NCSU players to make up 15. At any rate, the game continued to deteriorate and eventually resulted in an unfortunate neck injury to the NCSU Flyhalf. This prompted the arrival of the ambulance and my whistle to end this dead rubber game.
US Air Force B 51 - 5 Atlanta High Country

Hungover and having an extremely sore ankle I took this 3rd place match. I struggled to keep pace due to my ankle. At any rate, the Air Force ran around Atlanta High Country (D2 or D3 South) at will, scoring more than 1 point a minute. Atlanta scored a spirited try with about 1 minute to go, throwing a short lineout to their 300 pound prop/lock on the AF 5 meter line to bundle over.

Refereeing Overview of the Weekend:

During the tournament final I had a chat with the Western Suburbs captain (game #1 on saturday). He said he thought I did a great job refereeing his game, demonstrating great knowledge, decision making, and fitness but should in the future establish who is in charge from the get go. I should not let there be any gray area. This comment seemed to confirm an underlying issue I was having over the weekend and prior.....I have been allowing too much chatter/response from players..... why could this be? Can't be sure...maybe some uncertainty is sensed in my voice, maybe I look uncomfortable, maybe people doubt me due to my age, maybe I just like to talk about rugby too much. At any rate, me responding to this chatter casts doubt over my ability and hurts my ability to control a game. This characteristic of mine must change. The comments from the referee coach in XROXX game also relate to this. He helped to remove some of the issues, but hopefully over time I will learn to establish a cool calm presence as a referee.

3/8/2009 Naval Academy Women @ USMA Women (West Point)

First off, the Anderson Rugby Complex (West Point) is the best rugby facility I have EVER played or refereed at - and I played a year in Auckland, New Zealand. They have a turf field, a regular field, a gym, a referees locker room, home/away locker rooms, and various conference rooms for post game functions. The grass field can be seen from from all of the conference rooms, and there is also a balcony and bleachers to watch the games on the grass field. Not only that, the back drop to the field is the hudson river......Amazing.

Now this game was a reality check, these women really caught me off guard and it showed. I don't have a lot of experience refereeing upper level women's teams....I came to the game with the approach of a lower level women's game, which did not work. It was rough from the get go since I was of the attitude that I should let the little things go at the breakdown to keep the game going....but these women were good and if I wasn't communicating they began to happily infringe while I was just thinking they were ignorant innocent pretty ladies...how wrong was I. After getting hit with the ball once and almost tripping a few times I started to really get the point - this game is requiring me to focus and these women are the real deal.

Unfortunately I had already set the loose standard for the breakdown area and struggled to recover to control the breakdown effectively. It mostly lead to confusion because I had let certain infringements go before I started to penalise them. In sum, I felt I had a hard time evaluating the breakdowns - a combination of different game conditions contribute to how women form differently. It seemed the ladies became isolated a lot easier - ripping the ball from a players grasp during a tackle was commonplace, and support was typically slow to arrive in rucks, which resulted in a lot of players moving to play the ball immediately, going to ground near it and other players on the ground. There were a number of instances where ladies were not rolling away, the ball somehow got caught in somebody's legs, somebody fell over for no apparent reason.....just overall sloppy.

As the game wore on, however, I think I started to pick up the groove and pick out the true infringements from the sloppiness. Something I picked out as critical to the breakdowns was the binding, it seemed a lot of women had a tendency to just blast straight in without a bind, typically resulting in the ruck totally collapsing and a truly dangerous situation. This problem, as it persisted, resulted in a yellow card to the Navy captain for dangerous side entry (actually resulting in an injury to her own teammate). Overall Army proved to be the more legally aggressive side at the breakdown, successfully driving over and turning over the rucks. This, however, was the only part of the game Army was winning, as they were getting blown out in the set pieces out wide by Navy. I guess this just shows how important possession and the breakdown is.

This was the second game in two weeks decided by a conversion kick on full time....only on this occasion the comeback team won (Army). 22-20 final score. It was pretty emotional for the ladies involved.

Now, from a refereeing standpoint, my primary concern for this game was the scrums. They were being wheeled regularly - I was searching for that pulling front rower, but I simply could not spot the pull, so I could not penalise. I need some help in spotting this. In saying that, this game was video taped....a valuable tool for the scrum and evaluating my true TV presence....something I was trying to improve this game. Only thing is, I thought I had a horrible game...I don't want to see all the marginal forward passes and infringements that I missed...since I am sure there was A LOT!

Here is a link to the match report on the nerfu website: http://www.nerugbyrefs.org/schedules/match_report.cfm?match_id=4079

I will post the video to this blog once I recieve it.

2/28/2009 Harvard @ University of Connecticut

In the first game of the New England season University of Connecticut welcomed Harvard for 3 30 minute periods of rugby - the first two making up a typical game and third being for the newbies (B side).

Don Morrison also came down from Worcester to coach/evaluate my refereeing, which turned out to be extremely valuable.

For this game I set about to work on my scrum infringement recognition, my positioning, and my control of the breakdown with respect to players keeping their feet.

From Don, I will steal the match report:

The halves were 30 minutes in duration. The game started out with Harvard demonstrating better skills than UConn. More specifically, early in the game UConn really struggled in their first-time venture (practice or otherwise) to the great outdoors of late winter in New England. As the game progressed, UConn began to get rhythm. They established dominance in forward play, especially at rucks, and thus they provided their backs with ample opportunity to attack. However, the transition from forwards to back (i.e. scrumhalf) was severely deficient. Equally important, or perhaps even more so, was the deficiency of UConn’s kicker for goals and for touch. Suffice to say, UConn lacked a couple of skilled positions or they would have easily dominated this game once they got the cobwebs out of their winter hiatus. Harvard was very good at capitalizing on their moments, and their kicker for conversion attempts was brilliant. Harvard deservedly won this closely contested game.

It should be added, UCONN scored their last try on full time to make the score 20-21, they missed the conversion....very close game.

Now, to hit on my goals for the day, there is a lot of discuss, but I want to hit the major stuff:

• Positioning - by and large I improved in this department as the game progressed, as indicated by my eval. Don mentioned at half time that the players were fringing, from my saddle position I had assumed these were marginal, and was communicating to the players to take a step, but since I was in the saddle position, I could not get convince them to take a step back. In the 45 degree position, however, the players would respond immediately (smart players....it is harvard after all).
• Scrummage Infringements - unfortunately the teams did not provide me much of a challenge.
• Breakdown management - per Don's eval, I managed this pretty well. There were a few infringements where I called hands in the ruck where it should have been side entry / killing to the other team. Just need more games to develop my imagery.

I also have the eval for my records, which presents every aspect of the in great detail.

B Side game:

I first went over the scrum engagement again, just to check, since many of the players were new to the scrum. It proved important as one player had a real tendency to have his head below his hips and not bind properly. I corrected him there, but I had to give him a bit more attention during the game, fortunately no penalties. My initial shock in refereeing this period was the serious difference in game knowledge between these newbies and the A side. Essentially every player was coming to the ruck and losing their feet immediately, coming in the side, and well in front of the last foot. I tried my best to communicate the infringements – but I think the players were simply ignorant to their sins. I would penalize if it had a real material effect – such as a turnover or offsides, but I tried to keep the game going as best I could. About 7 minutes in I had a chat with the captains to reiterate my points, gave them a list of 3 things to tell their teams “Last foot, Keep your feet, come in through the gate – I want to keep the game going but we have got to keep it safe” This approach seemed to have effect for a few minutes, but after that they resorted to their original habits.