Confessions of an HS Soccer Referee

Interesting. Wonder why more referees don’t want to bother with HS? 🤔

Yes, some of those are reasons not to, but in my opinion, he left out the most glaring and that is GSOA themselves as well as the antiquated NFHS system that insists on using their own rule book instead of adopting FIFA laws of the game with their own local rules of competition to handle disciplinary matters.

It's a good point.  The 2-man system is a great example, as are the rules around clock management.

I always find the comments about the fans at HS soccer interesting. I wonder what schools have that kind of fan base. Just went to a game with my middle school aged child. It was a girls game, but the boys were immediately after. Big school. In the top 10. Playing a nearby school so should have been easy for opposing team’s fans to get there. There were less than 60 people there and that was including my kid’s team and their parents.

Agree that for most HS games its generally not the number of fans - it is that they sit elevated in the stands and as such you hear them more clearly on the pitch.  Plus the parents seem to get a little bit more vocal and emotionally invested for a HS game than they do on a sleepy weekend afternoon for travel soccer.  The combination is that both players and referees hear more from the stands in this environment and that can impact player and referee emotions too.  

When a girl hears her mom or dad yelling at her from the stands not to "take any more of that from that other girl" you can pretty much guarantee that the girl is going to push back or get pulled out of position because she's suddenly more motivated by what her mom said than her coach.  Same with some boys and their dads.  

When a player hears ongoing negative comments from opposing parents, I can pretty much guarantee that that player is going to commit some form of misconduct. I see this behavior regularly in the stands when I attend games and without fail, the player commits some form of misconduct towards his opponent or towards the fans. And the sad thing is its only rare that school officials intervene with the parents who pull this crap. 

As a referee, you definitely hear more in a stadium environment - even when the stands only have a few dozen fans. But even with larger crowds, there are voices and words that stick out and carry.  The players hear it too and it can have an adverse effect on the match.  I have had to stop college matches more than once because of inappropriate language being yelled from the stands at players. Sometimes student driven and sometimes from parents.

Personally, it would be one of the things that would be enjoyable about working HS matches because it adds an additional level of difficulty to managing matches, but when the HS ref associations create unnecessary barriers for experienced referees to do matches, its just not worth the hassle for many of us.  

IMO the rules differences are not that significant. During play, soccer is soccer.

Obviously the 2 man is the main detriment.

Clock management is goofy, but on the flip side, everyone knows exactly how much time is remaining. No guessing. Good referees use a little common sense to work around some of the injury management issues.

Couple of things I would like to see move from HS to club:
- cautioned player leaves the field until the next sub opportunity. gives kids a chance to cool off and helps reduce the quick second yellow. and if it's a hard foul, allows the fouled player a chance to cool off as well.
- pre-game conference with both coaches / captains. gives the referee crew a chance to share the same information with everyone at once and set the tone.
- eliminate player passes / roster checks. the club system is stupid. if you are going to cheat in youth soccer, shame on you, and we probably won't catch you.

Correct, during play, soccer is soccer.  The problem is that for 40+ years the powers that be both here in Georgia and elsewhere have tried to say that HS soccer is different and requires a "rule" book instead of the LoTG and then required you to attend an additional 9 hour course to referee HS soccer. College is the same, but at least in the college game you are getting paid substantially more money which makes the bureaucratic hassle worth it.

All these separate rules do is cause confusion for the players. The players just want to play and having slightly different rules for HS ends up causing frustration among players. Half of the whining on the field towards the end of the college game is about clock management. In USSF/FIFA, all I have to do is point to my watch and just say - hey, I am adding time and the players understand.  You don't have that flexibility in HS or in college unless you get really creative in your excuses to stop the clock and if you get too creative, you create problems under the rules.  

As for HS to club, I am sorry, but I disagree completely.

1) Cautioned players can always be removed by the coach - its a stoppage and only a fool for a referee would not allow a sub in such an instance. These players are used to having to cool themselves or a teammate down at the club level and coaches know who their hot heads are. As a referee, you can also use every tool in your tool belt to manage these players. If its a hard tackle that earned a caution, you have a chat with both the one who got carded as well as the player on the receiving end. 

2) Pre-game conference?  Really?  Come on, by HS the vast majority of these players have been playing for at least 4-5 years of competitive soccer.  They know the drill, they know what is expected.  Heck half of these guys spend more time watching high level soccer than even playing.  These conferences were dumb 30 years ago when I played and haven't gotten any better.  I cringe when I see a referee give his talk to a team or even the captains. Nine times out of ten the advice / expectations go out the window within a few minutes of the kick.

3) Rosters and player passes are an important part of how we as referees ensure that the proper players are sanctioned for bad behavior and for keeping club teams honest. Is it a hassle?  Yes, sometimes it is - especially when clubs schedule back to back games with insufficient time in between, but it is necessary for the game to remain fair. I would be all in favor of a system where team managers exchanged and verified the information before the game and heck for higher level games where subs are tracked, it would be great to have the managers also act as the scorekeepers and track those things, but in the grand scheme of things, it is a role and responsibility that falls to us and is usually pretty east to manage.  At the end of the day, all we can do is report roster / pass issues and let the league sort out violations.  And yes, occasionally, coaches will try and cheat.  I have had a coach try and use another player's player card for someone else.  I have had a coach try and sneak a concussed player back on the pitch - which we caught because we had properly tracked starters and subs. I have seen roster violations with players playing in too many games. Collecting and properly filing these rosters help ensure the safety and fairness for the players.  

In the end, HS soccer can be a valuable experience for players to experience playing under a higher level of emotional intensity - which is I believe the point that Wynalda was making and which is often absent from many of the weekly ECNL / MLSNext / Girls Academy games.  BUT, so long as HS soccer remains its own little fiefdom in terms of being separate from USSF in terms of both administration and refereeing, I don't see it as an important component of the soccer pyramid. If you are a serious player with aspirations of playing professionally or at the high D1 level, its a distraction that can be risky in terms of injury.  If you are a referee looking to work at higher levels it is also a distraction because none of the games count towards your advancement.  

Want more HS referees so that you don't have the same older adults working 40-60-100 games in a compressed spring schedule?  Open up membership to any USSF registered referee and allow the HS assignors to pull officials in based on their overall referee experience rather than whether they got their forms in during the fall and attended 9 hours of training sessions on top of what they already do for US Soccer and the college game.  






 

Are you really comparing a "Sunday League" Adult league when giving a reason why player pass and rosters shouldn't be a thing?  Come on man!  Of course no-one cares in a Sunday adult league what the rosters say.   

You are correct in less competitive environments such as Recreation youth games and academy games, there is less need for player passes and rosters, but in competitive level Select leagues it is necessary, and people do try to cheat.

This I can get behind.  A smaller older kid should be able to play down for player development.  This happens a lot in Academy (I know this for a fact as I've seen it be done except in tournaments where it isn't allowed).  Skill level and size should most definitely play a part in it versus just rigid age requirements.

US Soccer tried rolling something like this out a few years ago.  Honestly, not sure where it stands.  

As for age brackets, the original DA used two year brackets. If I recall correctly, one of the reasons they shifted to single year brackets was because it allowed clubs to keep more players in the pool and helped ensure that the younger players in a two-year bracket didn't lose playing time.