DJC on the Western Area Referees Course

As you should all know by now we will be running our own competition in October, obviously an essential part of running a competition is officials, Which thanks to Andy Scott we now have a number of within the club.

The other essential element is Referees, Which we currently have none of so when the West announced they were holding a referees course 5 of us of all grades and ages decided to attend

Corey, Kate, Myself, Ros and Kieron all made the trip thanks to Tony's newly fixed 7 seater to Glastonbury where the course was being held(Kate drew the 'short' straw and had to sit in the boot

We arrived with a few minutes to spare and were split into three groups, people taking re-val on National C, people taking a re-val on area referee and us Drakers on the club referee course which is the first rung on the ladder, the course was being conducted by Alan Kimber, Mike Guatieri and Mark Maslen.

Mark was given the unenviable task of taking us mere mortals and turning us into referees by the end of the day! One of the most eye opening things is the amount of information a referee has to retain and how decisions have to be made in a split second, many or the physical demonstrations where we were watching videos demonstrated this by how many different opinions were being offered.

Lunch came and went, and the event was catered which is unusual for a course and was provided by Glastonbury Judo Club so thank you to Bob and his team for that,

After lunch was more information including hand signals and penalties, we were then required to sit an exam which was quite daunting for someone who hasn't taken one in 22 years!

Im pleased to say we all passed, although the girls did get higher scores than us lads, to which Corey and Kate seemed delighted!

On a personal note i would like to mention how proud i was of Kieron Murphy who being only just old enough and a high enough grade did very well for his first 'senior' course and has a real enthusiasm for refereeing which I'm hoping to encourage

Over the next month we will all need to be assessed at a competition and then providing we are satisfactory we will be signed off

Onwards & Upwards

Ross