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Monthly Newsletter (September 2000)From the President's Whistle, John Hinton Assignments and Availability. We are having fewer and fewer tum-backs (of assignments) and no-shows (of referees at assigned matches). Keep up the great jobs you are all doing. Please keep your availability information up to date. Don't wait until you receive assignments before you let the assignor know of conflicts. If your schedule or enthusiasm differs from what you have submitted, update your availability through our website at www.livermorerefs.ora by email to hintonref@home.co , by phone at 447-203 1, or by mailing your calendar to PO Box 54. Remember, you will not receive assignments unless you tell us you are available. Expect to get assignments when you say you are available.Rules of Conduct. There are, unfortunately, continuing incidents of coaches treating referees with something other than respect. What is a coach allowed and not allowed to say? Where does the drive for competitive advantage cross the line? What can/should a referee do to deal with poor conduct from the bench or spectators?Here's what the CYSA Rules of Play say, "Coaching from the sidelines, giving directions to one's own team ... is permitted provided:
If a coach violates these rules of conduct, the referee should warn the coach. If they persist, then the coach should be cautioned or sent off. If they refuse to leave, the match should be abandoned. If spectators violate these rules, it is the coach's responsibility to enforce them. If the coach refuses, the coach should be cautioned or sent off. If the coach is unable to control their spectators, the match should be abandoned. If you, as a referee feel threatened or assaulted, abandon the match and call 911. It is a crime to threaten or assault a sports official. It doesn't happen very often. When it does, it should be taken very seriously. It is NOT part of the game. Referees should not be overly sensitive to what spectators or coaches say to us. We should not, however, feel powerless to act against abusive, insulting, or disruptive behavior at games. Know the rules and apply them - for the good of the game. Referee Conduct. It is also unfortunate that referees don't always behave in a professional, respectful manner to coaches, players, and spectators. When you enter the field as a sports official, your behavior and attitude should be exemplary. No matter how much "abusive, insulting, or disruptive" behavior you see from coaches, players, or spectators, YOU should treat them in a respectful manner. Don't bring your bad day at school or work onto the field with you. Whenever a referee loses their temper, insults a player, or badmouths a coach or spectator - it destroys their stature and authority on the field. And that loss carries over to how other referees are viewed and treated. If you can't lose that chip off your shoulder or put your personal troubles off to the side, then don't go to the game - for the good of the game.Match Conduct . Here's a few important reminders regarding match conduct:
Send-Off Reports. A blank send-off report is included with this newsletter (Webmaster's note: Go to District 3 Web Site for electronic version in PDF format.) Please make copies, and keep some in your bag. When you fill one out, write clearly, concisely, and use proper language. Know the LOTG regarding send-off offenses, and the proper language for describing these offenses. It's always a good idea to let an experienced referee read over your report to see if it's in order. Coaches have gotten send-off punishments dismissed because of "technicalities" with the language of the referee's report. Mail a COPY of the send-off report and game to the LRA, PO Box 54, Livermore. Mail the original send-off report, game card, and player pass (if high-comp) within 24 hours to the appropriate address:
The Following Message is from Chuck Thompson concerning game cards. I'm new to this job, just having inherited the whole season-to-date game cards.There are hundreds of the things to enter already ! The game cards should be important to you ? If we don't get the cards and we can't read them, you don't get credit and you don't get your reimbursement monies. Folks seem to be doing a real good job of getting the game cards turned in. It does not matter if the cards get dropped in the box for the field you are at, but please do get the cards dropped into a box during the same weekend. Drop Boxes are located at the following fields: Christianson, Robert Livermore, Robertson, Kellman, Max Baer, and we think there is a box at Junction (I just have not found it yet!) Please print your names plainly as well as sign the cards. Lots of people sign twice? These are pretty hard to read, I think there must be lots of doctors out there doing games. Mentors ? Please be sure you print your names in the comments section. We are tracking mentoring this year and reimbursing you for your participation in these games. Lots of cards are showing up with incomplete or incorrect information on the top of the card. PLEASE PRINT. Please make certain to complete the sections for Field, Age Group, Level of Play, Time and Date. About 20% of the cards so far have the wrong date or time. Few cards show the level of play. As soon as I get the first hundred or so cards entered, I'll be passing the reports to the treasurer, so start looking for your reimbursement checks. Thanks for all your efforts. Please pass the word! Chuck Thompson, Games Record Keener (email to:chuck(@.osisoft.corn)ARTICLES The following article appeared in Nature magazine. It is a research paper from a university in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. It is an interesting article that points out why we AR's must be as close to the offside line, and be able to judge how square that line is to the entirefield, to be able to make an accurate offside call. The authors state the point that AR's make many errors when calling offside and a alternate method for judging offside should be explored. However, for us referee's of youth soccer, I don't believe that conclusion is the interesting part of the article. This study articulates clearly why you must be as close as you can to the actual offside line to make an accurate offside call. (GK)brief communications Errors in judging 'offside' in football
Optical trickery can undermine the assistant referee's, view of this ruling. In football (soccer), a player is 'offside' if he or she is closer to the goal than the last defender (excluding the goalkeeper when the ball is passed to them. We investigated why assistant referees, who have the responsibility of judging oftside, regularly make mistakes. We show that this is probably due to the angle of viewing by the assistant referee, who is frequently positioned beyond the last defender - a viewpoint from which errors are optically inevitable. In a field experiment, three professional assistant referees (ARs, also known as linesmen) judged 200 potential offside situations played by two e I ite youth football teams (Fig. I a). The ARs made 40 errors. One explanation for these errors is that the AR cannot see passer and receiver simultaneously: this causes the AR to shift his gaze from passer to receiver and so make judgements a split-second after the moment of passing - long enough for the receiver to have gone past the last defender and appear offside'. We found, however, this is an unlikely explanation for these errors, because an AR equipped with a head-mounted camera showed no shift of gaze from passer to receiver. In 179 situations, the assistant referee was positioned beyond the last defender (mean, 1.18 m; s.d.=0.94). In Fig. I b, the outside' attacker is not offside. However when attacker and defender are projected onto the AR!s retina, the image of the attacker is just to the right of that of the defender. This means that the attacker is perceived as being in front of the defender, prompting the AR to wrongly raise his flag to call offside (flag error, FE). By contrast, in Fig. 1 c, the outside attacker is offside. But the AR will perceive attacker and defender as being in line, and so keep his flag down (no-flag error, NFE). If these ideas are correct, then, when the attacker goes outside the defender (Fig. lb), more FEs than NFEs should occur when the players are on the far side of the pitch from the AR, whereas the converse would be expected to occur when they are close to the AR (Fig. 1). In contrast when the attacker goes inside, more NFEs than FEs should occur far from the AR, and more FEs than NFEs should occur near the AR. This also holds for judging offside in the middle zone (Fig. I c): when the attacker goes right, NFEs are expected, and when left, FEs. Data from our experiments (first row of Table 1), and from 200 videotaped football matches from five national competitions (1996-98 seasons) and the 1998 World Cup (Table 1) confirmed these expectations. In situations far from the AR, more FEs than NFEs were made when the attacker went outside the defender. In situations near the AR, more NFEs were made. If the attacker went past the defender on the inside, the opposite occurred. In the middle zone, there were 48 NFEs and 18 FEs when the attacker went right, and 61 FEs and 18 NFEs when they went left (X= 36.17, P < 0.0001). In conclusion, errors made by ARs in judging offside may often be the result of the relative optical projections of the players on the ARs retina. This means that, regardless of the quality of the AR, judgement errors are inevitable owing to the apparent limitations of our perceptual system. In our results, 9.3% of the AR's calls of offside were FEs. Given the high stakes in modem football, this incidence of (inevitable) errors suggests that alternative ways ofjudging offside should be developed, such as off-line analysis of video images taken from an adequate observation point. Raoul R. D. Oudejans, Raymond Verheijen, Frank C. Bakker, Jeroen C. Gerrits, Marten Steinbruckner, Peter J. Beek. Institutefor Fundamental and Clinical Human Movement Sciences, Faculty ofHuman Movement Sciences, Vrye Universiteit, Van der Boechorststraat 9, 1081 BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands. e-mail: r_r _d_oudejans@fbw.vu.nl Table I Frequencies of flag errors and no-flag errors
The inter-observer agreement for the analyzed matches, computed on the basis of a selection of 12 matches watched by a second observer, was 93% (141 out of 152) for all potential offside situations and 90% (27 out of 30) for errors made by the ARs. 1. Sanabria, J. et al. Lancet 351, 268 (1998).
Figure I Offside situations. a, Experimental set-up of players in simulated offside situations. Attackers are triangles, circles are defenders (K is the goalkeeper also known as the netminder), and the flag at the sideline depicts the position of the assistant referee (AR). Situations were videotaped with two cameras from an apartment block next to the pitch, so that we could determine whether the AR had j udged the situation correctly. One AIR wore a lightweight, head-mounted video camera to record his head movements relative to the scene. Experimental details are available from the authors. b,c, How the AR would perceive the relative positions of attacker and defender in far situations (b), and in situations near the AR and in the middle of the field (c). FE (flag error) and~ NFE (no-flag error) show the kinds of error expected in each situation. NATURE | VOL 404 | 12 MARCH 2000 | www.nature.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
