School of Excellence

I guess in common with other County FAs, WRCFA run a School of Excellence where promising referees receive targetted in service training, etc.

They also train every Thursday night at the WRCFA HQ. Training is currently being led by Mark Haywood. As regular readers will know I've been training alone or with my wife at the local council gym. This has been geared to losing weight, toning up and improving my overall fitness. The training that the School of Excellence referees do specifically targets the running we, as referees, need to put in during a game.

The actual training is open to all who want to turn up and with a few nerves I dragged myself down there tonight. The first person I met was Emma Everson, who is a FIFA Assistant Referee for the Women's game. She's recently returned from a tournament in Greece. She was chatting with Alan Wilkie, former Premiership Referee. Emma mentioned that I'd lost weight and on telling her how much, Alan chipped in asking to know the secret. My answer of exercise and diet was met with a wry grimace - who says referees don't have a sense of humour?

I ran a lap of the field of play to get a warm-up and then Mark decided we all needed to do a couple of laps as an official warm-up. I managed one and a half laps before slowing to a walk for a third of the distance and then jogged back into the group. After a few shuttles involving the usual high knees, bum kicks, out to in, in to out, etc. we had a litle fun. As a final warm-up, Mark gave us a list of instructions associated with numbers he called

1 - left hand down
2 - right hand down
3 - both hands down
4 - one press-up
5 - find the nearest person and jump to give them a hi5
6 - jump and pretend to head the ball

It was the sort of stuff most teams do in football and rugby to increase team fitness. Everything went well until the first call of 5 and only 2 out of 30 referees got it right - I wasn't one of them! After another few minutes (interspersed with a lot of laughing), we moved on to the hardest part for me - part endurance, part speed.

This was designed (I'm guessing because no one said) to replicate the changes of direction and typical speed that most referees operate at during a game. The distances were varied and we cycled through the shuttle runs quite a few times (I managed 7 sets), by which time I was feeling exhausted. My speed had dropped from 3/4 pace down to a slow jog by the last leg of the run.

After a short recovery period we did some sprints over increasing distances. Having been a sprinter at school and a winger when I played rugby (Union and League) I was on my favourite part!!! On the second sprint my friend, Elliott Kaye pulled his hamstring. On the very last sprint I did exactly the same. It hurt like hell. To finish the whole group managed a light jog around the field of play again. I walked a lot of it, but did some stretches on the way round. The whole group stretched out and then we made our way to the shower or as in my case, home.

I sent a text message to Andy Madley, one of two brothers who are enjoying their second year on the Conference, thanking him for the invite and encouragement when training. He came back with some nice compliments and mentioned that Mark Haywood had commented on my speed (must have been before I was hopping around clutching the back of my leg!). I also got to meet Ricky Wootton who is my Referee for my FA Vase game on September 23. I realised that I'd worked with Ricky before and he remembered it too. It had been a Huddersfield Town Academy game. He said it was against Middlesboro and I took his word for it. He seemed pleased to have me in his team for next week, so I'm hoping this hamstring pull goes quickly. It seems better after a hot bath and rubbing in some Deep Heat, so now for some rest. My worry is that tomorrow I have to do a lot of driving for work and 10 hours pressing on the accelarator will not my recovery any favours!!!

Last part, despite having forgotten to start my watch on the warm-ups, I managed to burn off another 540 calories tonight. My heart averaged over 155 for most of the evening and peaked at 171 ... not bad for a fat old bald bloke.