3/28/2009 Fatal Fourway (UMASS Amherst, Amherst College, Providence College, Sacred Heart College)

This spring tournament was held at UMASS Amherst. Despite the beautiful sunny conditions, the fields were horrendously muddy, both having standing water. All four teams played two 60 minute games.

Providence College 15 - 5 Amherst College

This game got off to a bad start when Providence College wore black and Amherst College wore black jerseys with a dark purple stripe. After about 5 minutes in the mud, both teams were wearing black. I did my best to manage the colors but it really made things difficult. Fortunately it was clear who was the better side so it did not effect e result.

Refereeing wise the most hotly contested point of the weekend was "Bridging" and it's materiality. There were a couple of instances in the first game were I had the coach yelling from teh sideline about it, where I had determined it immaterial. It was causing confusion with players.

Providence College 27 - 12 UMASS Amherst

This game was on the better field (though still with standing water) and teams with different color jerseys: Red/White and Black.

An excerpt from the UMASS Amherst rugby website:

"The next match against a Providence College, a match fit team. They had toured on Spring Break to Bermuda for three matches, added a match vs BU, which they won 32-0 and and defeated Amherst College earlier in the day 15-5. This too, was an exciting match, though PC showed the ability to maintain possession as well as forcing turnover ball. We fell to 0-17 at the half. We fought back and never lost our sense of determination. We began to get our act together and matched them at every turn. Tries were scored by Nick Petmezis and Connor Carroll in a 12-12 second half battle. We lost too much of our own possession, where PC showed great concentration on ball retention and the ability to strip ball from our hands. The 17 point 1st half hole we dug, proved to be too great and we lost 12-27."

The most important take away from this game was the UMASS coach's comments about bridging. He was adamant that I had penalized some immaterial bridging or "killing" the ball. The coach, however, makes some good points...his side lost this game at the tackle, they were simply not aggressive enough. Did I allow Providence too much leway and credit at the tackle/breakdown? I don't think so.

3/21/2009 U Albany v. Albany Knicks

In an open weekend for me, I volunteered to help my adopted club (Albany Knicks) out and referee a friendly scrimmage with the local college side, U Albany. The game was to be played on a surface impossible to play rugby on, hard field hockey turf. This resulted in most players wearing tennis shoes, long sleeves and pants to avoid the nasty scrapes certain to result. We played two 20 minute periods, taking time outs for short coaching sessions.

Fortunately this was a friendly, so all of the players were only out their to help each other, nobody wanted to hit the ground anyway. The scrums could not really be contested due to a lack of footing, and the D1 Knicks totally ran rampant over the scrambling college boys, I don't even recall the score. I do recall a try being scored off the kickoff though, without a tackle even being made (had the time been measured, it may have even made the guinness book of world records).

The game presented a great opportunity for me to practice positioning, whistle tone, signals, and prove my worth to the local rugby club.

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.

2/14/2009 Raleigh B v. Fort Bragg

I went down for Raleigh, NC last weekend for a visit. When my older brother realized I was in town, and he had no referee assigned for his club's game, he asked me to officiate - mainly so he didn't have to do it. At any rate, I was happy to get a run in, considering my next game will be Mid-March (St. Paddy's Day in Savannah).

Fort Bragg is a D3 men's club, Raleigh is the 2007 D2 National Champion and is in the D1 playoffs this year - a mismatch as I'm sure you can imagine. The final scoreline, 67-5, was certainly not flattering to Fort Bragg, but considering the quality of opposition and how I have seen Bragg play in the past, I thought they did well as they blooded a few new players (front rowers) and had a numbers of other players waiting on the sideline aching to get into the mix.

A few notes on my performance in the game:

• My fitness is not where I thought it was.

I found myself much farther behind play than I used to be, maybe Crossfit (which I recently joined) is not doing what I thought it would for my running fitness, or maybe my rehabbing ankle had not been on a proper run for awhile. Maybe I was letting my thoughts slow me down as it had been awhile since my last game so I was debating my decisions more with myself....cant be sure, the reason I was behind is probably a combination of all three and the only solution is to referee more games (and maybe run more).

• Scrummage Infringement recognition improved.

This maybe have been due to the inexperience of the Bragg front rowers, but I spotted Raleigh coming in early a number of times, foot up, but no non straight feeds (I warned the halfback). I even had the halfbacks kick the ball back into the scrum twice...NUTS!

• One dangerous tackle

I had an upending tackle in the first minutes of the game and I responded with a loud intimidating whistle and chat with the offending captain (no card). No more foul play / high tackles for the rest of the game. I guess I showed where I stood pretty well....

• Halfback unhappy with my positioning

While refereeing the breakdown, I first take a position close to the ruck (behind, mobile) to find the ball, see that is won and usually retreat to the saddle and check the offsides. The Raleigh halfback, however, complained I was always blocking his line of sight to his flyhalf in my first position - effecting the game since he can't get vision before he passes the ball the second time he looks. I can see where the player is coming from, but the main thing I conclude from this criticism is that I was not varying my position enough. Or he was just a moaner.

• For the first time as a referee, I got knocked over this game - in a swinging tackle, it swung in a direction I did not expect, right by the goal line. Fortunately I regained my feet and was in position for the try a few seconds later. I figured I would be hearing a lot about my stumble after the game, but the only person who seemed to notice was my girlfriend (#1 fan).
• My brother scored a try.

12/06/2008 Toys for Tots Tournament, Charleston, SC

The week before this tournament was my last week of University before graduation, requiring the presentation of my senior projects and other such matter. In an unexpected event my team won 2nd place in the senior design competition for our tape measure and tool used to manufacture it (pictured). We were to win several hundred dollars but were also required to attend the awards ceremony. The awards were set to be given the night before this tournament in Raleigh (4 plus hours from Charleston, SC where the rugby tournament was located). I was the leader of the senior design team, obliged to attend.

Friday night also happened to be the "Hillsborough Hike," the traditional drinking challenge for graduating seniors from nc state - drinking a beer at every establishment along hillsborough street, which I was also obliged to partake in.

In sum, it was a challenge to wake up that saturday morning and cruise the 4 plus hour drive to charleston to referee my first game at 11 AM. As I arrived (at 11 am, on time) I discovered the teams (Citadel Women and Charleston Women) had already taken the field, fully kitted up and ready to go, waiting for me. So I rushed to the field, loaded up with my whistle and scorecard ready to go, sat down to tie my boots and SNAP - my left shoe lace split. Referees cannot be late, my boots are too small anyway, I took the field and started the game, one shoe totally untied. I remedied the problem at half time with my spare shoe laces. 

I refereed the following games:

Charleston Hurricanes v. Citadel Women

Columbia v. Citadel Men

Citadel B v. College of Charleston B

The most interesting event of the day was in the Columbia v. Citadel game, a "cavalry charge." 

First of all, the field was poorly lined, some white lines and some blue lines - used for soccer, track and field, and now rugby. As a player the try line was particularly confusing, there was a very faint white line about 2 meters beyond the actual try line (blue) - throughout the day I had a number of different players score to the white line instead of the actual try line.

At any rate, Citadel was awarded a penalty 5-10 meters out for hands in the ruck. They formed up for a tap and go in a "flying wedge" formation. The players began their run before the quick tap so I prepared to call the cavalry charge.....only for the scrumhalf (taking the quick tap) to pass to his flyhalf and not to any of the players running in the "wedge." The Columbia captain however, immediately protested, all of his players stopped playing, the citadel flyhalf then cut back inside through the wedge OVER THE TRYLINE.....but he was trying to reach the fake one, he was stopped and formed a "maul" (though a maul cannot exist in-goal) (the columbia captain still whining about the cavalry charge). A citadel player then dropped the ball to ground behind him, one his scrumhalf came up behind him and picked the ball up from the ground in the tryzone...I awarded the try....

In sum, maybe I should have stopped play when the flyhalf stepped back inside to the "wedge" of player congestion for accidental offsides...scrum to columbia....but columbia should really just respond to my whistle and not what infringements they think they see.....

I thought this day was an improvement over the some of the previous weekends when taking into to consideration my interpretation of offsides and positioning (still primarily in the saddle), but the Columbia coach said I was missing a lot of offsides from the position....but on the same token, I dont think it's really worth calling those truly marginal offsides calls...it's mainly important the players are just respecting a line around their last foot....