Part 2

Tuesday was full of more festival games, consisting of the U8/U9 boys and girls age groups.

The younger the age group you officiate, typically the more involved you have to be as a referee since players are still learning the rules and improving upon their physical literacy.

However, to many of our Club Referees’ surprise, this was not the case. Jared, who has experienced his own number of FTF events from a player’s perspective as a winger/striker for one of our Club’s high performance program teams, as well as being a Club Referee, provided some thoughts on the players after his batch of matches on Tuesday came to an end.

“They were actually really good. I was not expecting that level of speed and ball control from this age group. They were better than some OPDL players and teams I’ve seen!”

Kaelyn, a high performance program player herself, agreed with Jared on his points.

“I found it (the U8/U9s) more challenging than the U10/U11 groups because of their faster motion of play, and the constant calls that I needed to make.”

“One officiating style that I had to change for this age group was to move around more, and at a faster pace too. The U10/U11 groups were more composed when playing. However, because these younger players played much more quickly, they were more likely to lose control of the ball. This meant I needed to always be on my toes because play was happening quicker.”

As much technique as the U8/U9 players had, the biggest day of the event belonged to the U12/U13 boys and girls on Wednesday, competing in a round-robin cup tournament.

Be sure to keep an eye out for Part 3 of our FTF X NT news roundup coming next week!