I have heard plenty of people talking up their playing ability so far this season and there aren't too many who have backed up these comments. most have fallen well short of their stated ability and produce substandard performances, only person who has manned up is Vince.

Vince also stated a while ago that during his very short refereeing experience, that he found it a lot harder than expected.

There is a restricted number of officials around so if you can think that you can do a better job, put your hand up and attend a course or two! I think that all regions are going to struggle for officials in the next year or two.

Guess the ref has to understand which way the abuse is flowing, but there are penalties to cover most circumstances. Putting JVL on a pedestal for giving an obscene gesture is not the smartest thing to because it now condones that behaviour, if it was seen by the ref, then an appropriate penalty would be assessed. I saw a Canterbury played get chucked out of a game for a similar incident at Nationals in Dunedin  a couple of years ago.

Exactly.

If I was a referee everyone would hate me as I'd be handing out penalities left, right and center. I guess that's a part of the problem though, those who would enforce the rules vigorously can't be bothered doing the job.

Yeah, unfortunately many players also fit into the "moron" category and don't seem to get it that the best way to improve refereeing standards is to encourage my refs to join and to thank them when they do a good job. Ranting when they make an honest mistake, or even worse accusing them of being intentionally biased seems like the worst way to improve the situation.


Is that a reference to me? In which case no, I have no interest in refereeing. The players would hate me as I would enforce every irritating rule imaginable and I don't think I'd be very good at the important side of it anyway as I don't tend to pay enough attention and would miss stuff all the time.



Do you have any tips on how we should go about recruiting new referees/linesmen? Dunedin was in a horrid situation a few years ago with a total lack of any knowledgeable officials whatsoever and the games were kinda messy because of it. Thankfully a whole fleet of new officials signed up and the quality ramped up substantially, but now the numbers seem to be tailing of again from what I've seen and I assume the DIHA will be needing a new influx to boost numbers again.

We have plenty of qualified referees in Dunedin, the trick is getting them over the hurdles of doing their first games and then managing them up to being confident enough to be regulars.

At the higher level there's a problem with top level contact games in that we really need supervision from top referees to get feedback on what we're doing, and we have no senior referees in Dunedin.

Think the way to get around this could be to have pre season games maybe a couple of weekends before the start of the season, we could use rinks that can accomodate the ice time and give some new referees the whistle with the current 'top' referees as linemen to assist.
If the players know what is going on then I think this would be a good iniation period
then get these guys on the lines in as may games as possible.

Most of all the league needs support from all regions as has been said before we can bitch all we like about ref's but we need to supply our own.

In saying that, it seems abit odd to have all Canterbury Officials in Queenstown for the two biggest games of the season.

Can anyone tell me if any official programmes are currently being run in NZ

The NZIHF run the officials courses around the country but they do need a 'local' to organise the course, ie ice time and room. I heard that there was one run earlier this year in Dunedin and over a Nat Leag weekend.

Canty refs have travelled all season with the Nat Leag, guess whoever assigned the games is aware of that and it should not have that much of a surprise.

kelf, you'd be the first to throw up the bias flag if the games don't go the home teams way then??

Ryan, you're out there doing it and both Mike and Kyle have shown that the southern guys aren't too far behind. I think if you asked them, they would say that they have learnt a lot this year. You are an intelligent man, I have to agree with you that some players are morons, or do the helmets restrict blood flow to the brain. We have seen the same players doing the same stuff year in year out.

Of course, but who ever has allocated the ref's for the games is just putting the ref's and players under more pressure!
But the only time I will blame the ref's are if they have a shocker, and in these games neither team can afford that.

Surely it would make more sense to have the Auckland ref's in Queenstown this weekend and the Cant's in Auckland - In saying that not sure which option is worse.

In the end, it should be the best team who wins on the day(s), if that is the case I will be a happy Stampede supporter!

You can probably get a referee down from Auckland as long as one is available. We got Peter Haxell down for our last home games last year. But the host team has to pay for their travel.

Im pretty keen to get into reffing the national league, i would need a couple of warm up games as a lines man, but i know for sure i could come in and ref better than some of the refs we had this year and last year. My biggest problem though is that im a player before a ref so while i can still play in the league thats what i will be doing. There are a few other good players down this way who are in the same situation