Assessor's Course Part Deux

I arrived at the County FA in a casual shirt and trousers to find I was very over dressed for the course as all the other delegates and the Referees Development Officer were wearing polo/t-shirts and tracksuit bottoms.

We had a short briefing concerning the match we were going to see and then some guidance on what to look for. We also received the FAs Guide for Assessors which set out the standards expected for each level of refereeing. This gave us a yardstick against which the referee's performance could be measured. I also realised that I knew the referee, so this was going to be interesting.

We set off to the ground and my mate, Aidy was volunteered to drive. He has a very nice car and unfortunately I managed to crush the foot of the delegate sitting behind me when I got into Aidy's car. Aidy was promoted to level 3 at the end of last season and this was hard earned but fully deserved.

So to the game which was a scrappy affair between two teams in the lowest division of one of Sunday Leagues in the Leeds area. There was little for the referee to do and he did it well. I found it very challenging to have to spend the whole game watching the referee's positioning, movement, considering his decisions and how he arrived at them. In the end, I was glad to have a quiet game to assess.

Once we got back to the County FA Headquarters, we had lunch and chatted over a few things with the referee. We then had to put together some rough notes on his performance and award him a mark out of 100. We broke the performance down into 7 key areas

1 Application of the Laws
2 Positioning, Fitness & Work Rate
3 Alertness and Awareness including the management of stoppages
4 Communication
5 Teamwork
6 Advantage
7 Match Control

Marks were awarded for each area with weightings applied to reflect the relative importance importance of the areas. These are then combined to give an overall mark.

I was happy with the mark I gave him and then headed home to work on the report itself. This was very much like hard work and it took me a few hours to get the wording right so that I congratulated him on the things he did well and provided constructive criticism on the areas I thought he needed to work on.

I then asked a senior colleague to offer a critique on the report and he suggested changes to a couple of lines and the odd word here and there, so I did pretty well. It's gone to the County FA for their feedback. Once I have completed three assessments (including this one), if they meet the required standard, then I become a Registered FA Assessor.