Well. . .I’ve been away for a while. This fall, I’ve intentionally taken fewer matches. After Regionals, I felt like in prepping for Regionals I was neglecting my consulting business (I own a Mac-based support consultancy) and needed to focus on that. I also have a 2 year old at home, so I’m never hurting for things to do. So this fall, I’ve been doing some adult league ARs as I get more comfortable with the complaining and tempo of play and I’ve taken very occasional youth league matches.
This past weekend, I decided to do a U14G middle. I hadn’t done a middle in about a month and wanted to stay in the swing of things. For the most part, it was totally run-of-the-mill - but I definitely had an “Oh Shit!” moment. I got the match started and as the match progressed, I was getting some dissent from a player. I told her that I didn’t want to hear any more, but she persisted. I went to my right front pocket for the yellow card and - “Oh Shit!” I left the cards in my bag. Now. . .I won’t say that I did the right thing - but what I did was that I told the player that I was cautioning her for dissent and restarted play with an IFK for the opposing team. I did NOT do anything silly, like pretending to hold up a card or anything like that. But I was totally mortified that I did something as bone-headed as leave the cards in the bag. I’ve been a referee for 21 years and had never forgotten red & yellow cards. Fortunately, I got through the rest of the first half without needing them again.
All in all, the match went fine. I got a chance to work on getting wide earlier, but the next day I was definitely feeling the consequences of the layoff. We’ll just say I’m not in my early 20s anymore, so recovering from a layoff isn’t as easy as it used to be.
October 17th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Last Saturday I had a varsity game and one of the girls turns to me and say “do you need this?” and hands me my red card. I had it in my back pocket and somehow it came out. I was in ahh….