ref

Officially to some extent, though I have yet to act in the capacity, I am now an AYSO referee. I got to spend a hellish Saturday at a church. For the first half of the day my diet was based entirely on available food, Krsipy Kreme doughnuts and Pizza Hut pizza. I had two cups of coffee and two cans of Coke and one bottle of water. The water, at the time, was the worst thing, making me feel oddly worse.

The class wasn't really so bad. The worst was the discussion of off side with the room, not really that many people actually, half of whom were getting an understanding for off side law as we were discussing it.

If you have a person in or near a corner of the penalty area in an off side position but the attacker with the ball shoots from the the area of the opposite corner and scores, what would it take for the first player in the off side position to be considered to have effected the keeper? Oh, we could have gone on for hours in happy discussion of off side.

We didn't thankfully.

Now I have to actually ref a game or two. Taking the class was of course the easy part, and I've bitten off a good bit with this approaching season. Coaching both Big Brother in U10 and The Boy in U6 and now reffing, probably U8 to begin with. There is a ref sign up page on the area web site, so I have some influence on the game I ref, but there's also the need to gain experience, work my way up, coupled with the area's need to cover the older level games before the younger ages. U6 coaches ref their own games, which is actually fun. There is that fear that you'll get engulfed by the cute cloud of four and five year olds that congregates around the ball and moves as a single unit about the field, that fear that you'll get chopped to pieces from the shins up under a torrent of widdle cleats.

I can feel your excitement all the way over hear, shimmering through power lines and the cable wire. You're all so happy to know that your boring derby stories will finally get their old cousin soccer stories back. And U10 keepers can use their hands. Did I tell you that? And I don't know shit about keeping, so it'll be fun for all of us.