šŸŒŽ Most Interesting Thread in the World

Please wait for that money break down at the end everyone

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@jazznutUVA flyboys am i right?

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Flyboys are good at everything

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@AdventiveQuasar I was refereeing an ECNL RL (see below pyramid to understand the level - ECNL has a National League as well as Regional Leagues) girls match on Sunday. Austin, TX team vs Indianapolis, IN team. Why are they in Richmond, VA in November… no idea.

Ball going out of bounce and both girls slide into it. Both touch ball but one clips player on shin after ball contact.

Indy team coach is Irish… dude legit rushes me on the field yelling and cursing that his player was fouled and could have been badly injured.

Both girls had gotten up and walked away… no other player complained.

So first… i had to calm the Irish coach down as the madder he got, the less i understood (@BDragon knows)… then i had to make him mad again when i gave him a red card for dissent AND entering the field without referee permission.

He came up to me after the game and apologized… told me someone had just told him Harry Kane and England had just scored 4 goals in 10 minutes on Ireland in the Nations League and he was pissed (angry not drunk).

Refereeing is fun.

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Younger daughter’s field hockey season wrapped up a couple weeks ago, and I’m honestly glad her career is over.

I know all the parents and most of them are really nice most of the time. The extent to which they get into the matches used to be kind of amusing, but as the season wears on, and especially once the playoffs start, it ratchets up and starts making me borderline uncomfortable.

Like, no, this isn’t the worst ref’ed match you’ve ever seen, because this is the 6th game this season you’ve said that about (though I will say a game they had earlier in the season might have actually been the worst ref’ed field hockey game I’ve ever seen, and of the dozens I’ve watched was the only one where I actually thought it was possible the conspiracy theorists might have been right). Our dog is dumb as a box of rocks but she reads people’s emotions well, and we stop taking her to matches around mid-season because the intensity of the spectators starts freaking her out.

I’m sure studies have been done on this because I find it bizarre that otherwise perfectly nice parents are losing their s**t over a call in a game where we’re up 5-0 in the 4th quarter. Sure, the ref missed that call but it was not only a close call but also utterly meaningless as the game has functionally been over for a while. Why aren’t you having a drink and enjoying the impending victory?

Naturally, the final was a close, narrowly decided match so everything was dialed up to 11. It ended well, but I was uncomfortable just watching it. I can’t imagine having ref’ed it.

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First game of the weekend on Friday… team from Wilmington, DE… I think it was just ONE husband and wife…

ā€œYou’re terrible!ā€
ā€œwhistle, whistle, whistle, whistle, where’s the whistle?ā€
ā€œI can’t believe how horrible a job you are doing!ā€
ā€œAre you f’ing kidding me? Foul all day!ā€
ā€œHow much is the other team paying you to make such sh!tty calls?ā€

Those are just the ones I remember… but they were a man and a woman sitting next to each other and they yelled at me for the entire 90 minutes. They were the only ones yelling at me… no players or coaches… just those two.

I’m sure they are a lot of fun at dinner parties.

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Kick them out. Have seen it happen few times

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The classic reference is the ā€œThey saw a gameā€ study done in the 50s about a Dartmouth-Princeton football game:

Hastorf and Cantril conclude :: ā€œIn brief, the data here indicate that there is no such ā€˜thing’ as a ā€˜game’ existing ā€˜out there’ in its own right which people merely ā€˜observe.’ The game ā€˜exists’ for a person and is experienced by him only insofar as certain happenings have significances in terms of his purpose.ā€

Side note, looking this up led to me finding this more modern day version of ā€œThey saw a gameā€ where the project creator built an application that directly compared team-aligned broadcasts for a particular basketball game:

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Perhaps in NJ and NY it is allowed for the referee to kick individual parents out… but in VA, I cannot kick out individual parents unfortunately.

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They might be monsters, but they also might be perfectly nice the rest of the time. Some people just view sporting events as a time to let their Id just run totally wild and unchecked, and the more folks are like that the more other folks seem to decide that’s acceptable as well.

For that game, I’m glad everyone else was able to restrain themselves. And I find it wild those two didn’t notice everyone else watching respectfully.

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Nope they are monsters

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Couple I saw were in PA actually. NJ area it is just sadly part of the game. Even the kids on the field cursing at refs

And usually in Spanish or Portugues or even Polish sho ref doesnt always know what the F is going on

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I don’t care what language you are speaking… if you are directing it at me and I can see the dissent in your eyes, because that is universal, you are getting the appropriate card. In youth sports in Virginia, any dissent using curse words at a referee, an opposing player or at your own teammate is a direct red card.

If I don’t know the language… I guess they will only get a yellow first… but I don’t have to understand what they said for the yellow.

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1 thing Rugby absolutely gets right even if it’s not handled as well at the lower levels here in the states.

Any backchat by a player to an official is a cardable offense and can be thrown out.

Parents are nightmares and it’s more difficult to toss them, but athletes absolutely should be chucked.

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I umpired Little League, Sandy Koufax League (13 and 14 year olds) and Pony League (13 to 15 year olds) baseball when I was in high school and college. I had the plate in a Koufax League game during the summer after my first year at UVA. The park where the game was held had a concrete grandstand 15 or so levels high surrounding the infield. For the first 3 innings or so, I was getting ragged hard by what sounded like 3 rednecks sitting about halfway up the grandstand. I always had a rule that I wouldn’t scan the stands to find my tormentors because I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing they’d gotten to me. Finally, during the middle of the 4th, I was pissed enough to look up in the stands to try and identify the 3 assholes who were riding me mercilessly, profanely, and, in my estimation, unfairly. When I finally spotted them, it was my father, brother, and cousin, all of whom exploded with laughter as soon as I looked in their direction. With family like that, . . . .

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I just took 3 All Star teams to our North Carolina Rec State Tournament.

8U, 12U, and 14U. One of the things we drilled into them was sportsmanship and we told all the families as well that they needed to demonstrate great sportsmanship. My regular teams don’t have a problem as I have made that clear to my players and families, and I have used the bench as a reward for dissent or attitude issues.

Our Rec Director was there and he said he received numerous compliments all weekend about our families among all the teams.
Sportsmanship played a big factor in our 12U Championship game as we had one player receive a yellow card for a large foul ( not unsportsmanlike- just a collision he got there late on) and the other team had a kid receive a yellow for repeated encroachment on our free kick - kickoff to start play after they scored. We ran a play to fake a pass back and then kick it forward into space to our striker. :slightly_smiling_face::slightly_smiling_face: same player encroached twice and was warned and then did it a 3rd time and received a yellow.
Then in 2nd half we had a free kick and as our player approached he ran toward the ball - encroaching again … he was actually warned and proceeded to cuss the ref (white guy) in Spanish…. Ref knew Spanish and gave him his 2nd yellow and kicked him out. We ended up winning 6-3 with a man advantage playing a pretty big part…

Oh and also our 8U team won the championship in a PK shootout - we changed goalies right before the PKs and parents were screaming bloody murder that he can’t switch goalies before the shootout. All I did was put one of my field players who is my tallest, most athletic kid in goal and move my goalie to a field player for the shootout. I had planned to do that all along and actually had given that kid sometime at goalie earlier in the tournament just in case we were go to a shoot out thinking that his size and athleticism would cause some bad kicks by the opponents. It worked as he only allowed one goal out of five and we won the championship on the opponent missing their 5th kick.

Thankfully the officials knew the rules.

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I hope it was a direct red and not a second yellow. Different sanction and different after game punishment.

Cursing at officials is ridiculous.

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Yeah it probably was - I wasn’t sure - just helped us go from down 3-2 with 20 minutes left to 4 goals in a row … we were coming on anyway but it definitely made it easier since they didn’t have numbers to counter attack.
And I could tell he might get another one the way he reacted to his first one… like in his own league probably got away with whatever.
I kept my player out after his yellow until the other kid got booted to mitigate the risk of going down a man.

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I once got a straight red card on my kindergarten team. And to be honest, it was deserved - I slide tackled a child from behind on a clear goal scoring opportunity. But respect to the ref for being willing to red card a kindergartner.

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I’ve seen this in little kid leagues… since most of them don’t really understand what they are doing and don’t have full control of their bodies yet… I would just take over the player to his coach and tell him that this kid cannot come back in the game for any reason.

The red card not only drops your team down one… but prohibits a rec league player from playing in the next match… so I’m not doing that if a kid is just not sure what the heck he is doing at that age.

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