The Chance to Bring More Quality On the Court

Too often in the last 20 years I met international refs which told me:

“I get not enough possibilities for going into high-level games.”
“I have not enough experience in these games.”

That means that some internationals go on the court without having this necessary and important experience. Therefore these refs get sometimes problems to handle the top games in the way they should. After the game the ref feels unhappy and the follow is that also the teams are not happy about what was going on during the game.

The players and coaches are training very hard to raise their standard during the whole year. The referees train mostly themselves or with the feed-backs of the supervisors in different ways, but mostly on lower levels. To understand when a disadvantage is important for the situation in the game or not, is really a big point and is not easy to realize. To realize this for the highest level the ref needs permanent training for reaching this point. After reaching this level it is much easier to follow now the development of our game. I know that there are also other important points like the game-management etc. for being a good referee.

In this article I want to concentrate on the point of getting experience on the high level because I think that all nations have the possibility to help us referees for this important point and therefore for their / for our game.

Every year we have in the different countries friendship-tournaments in what ever way. A lot of these tournaments are preparation-tournaments before big international events. What I realized for my own country Germany is that in the last years we had more and more of these events. Excellent possibilities for the teams and the referees to „train“ themselves. We have the luck with a really good cooperation with our national teams and their staff especially the managers. They realized very early that we need this possibilities for our own development. Normally we get for every event of the teams the possibility to send a delegation-ref with the team outside the country wherever they go (if the host country accepts this).
For tournaments in Germany it was normally every time allowed that refs from other countries can participate in our tournaments. We realized that not a lot of countries used this possibility.

A lot of times we had for example refs from the Netherlands in our tournaments. They used in 2007 two of our tournaments for preparing their candidates for the international licence and both passed the exam last year. Australia brought for the second time a ref to Germany. To my opinion for the first time we had last year a Canadian and a British ref in a tournament.

The question now is why more refs are coming in the last year?

We changed the system for participating teams in our tournaments.
For example:
Paralympics-Preparation-Tournament in Osnabruck at the end of may 2008
Teams: GB – Australia – Canada – Germany
Regulation: Every team must bring a ref into this tournament.
If not they have to pay 500,oo € (example) to the organizer for a local ref.
We had 3 refs from GB, Australia and Canada and additional a couple of Germany. These nations realized very quick what our intention was and gave their refs a chance to go for their own development. That was great for the refs because it was the highest level they could get at this time. 4 of the top 5 of the world played in this tournament on a really high level.

I know that also some other countries give their referees the possibility for this development. But I know that we have a big difference in handling this point all around the world.

Normally as team I must buy one ticket more for the ref when going out of the country. If this team next time makes a tournament in his countries the other teams bring their own refs into this tournament. It saves the host-team a lot of money for local refs which they don’t need. To my opinion a very clear system, which costs not so much money and it gives a lot of referees the possibility to develop to a better standard.

I am sure that we all in this big family in this fantastic sport can get more comfort and more quality on the court in our international tournaments all around the world if we give the referees a chance for more possibilities of development!

Uli OTTO

Former IWBF Referee

Referee Supervisor