Why did I start refereeing?

photo by Amy Maidment

The first tournament I 'refereed' at was Valentine's Cup 1. This was back in the halcyon days of no-one (pretty much) being qualified, so at merc tournaments the captain had to head referee games, and enlisted members of their team to help out. As I'd broken my arm two weeks before and couldn't play, I tried to be as helpful as possible by assistant refereeing. Well, the original form of assistant refereeing which was basically calling beats and trying to get the head referee's attention if you thought someone had done something particularly bad, even if you had no idea how legal anything was ever.

For some reason I enjoyed that experience, and I actually read the rulebook to take the IQA (former IQA which became USQ) tests. I was also trying to impress my quidditch mentor at the time. After two abysmal - 50% - attempts at the snitch referee test I passed that one, and scraped through the assistant ref test first try, only to promptly fail the head referee test because I didn't realise that I would actually be expected to memorise the pitch dimensions. Undeterred, I went on to referee at An Almighty Battle and Roxdon the First, and since then I haven't really stopped. I love being able to help out, and knowing that when I'm on pitch I can control the quality of refereeing. My rules knowledge is helpful to my team, to my captain, and it's also nice to be known as someone who will have the answer to a question.

I feel that I have earned a lot of respect as a referee, especially over the past year. I was fairly lucky in that when I started, the refereeing quality was low and it was easy to slip in and be perfectly average - if you were bad, it was more likely to be because everyone was bad. There was a lot less pressure on referees to be good straight away, and because I didn't do a big or important tournament until about six months after I started refereeing, I could find my feet without anyone chewing my head off. I'm not sure how true that is for people starting to referee nowadays, but the sport has grown so much and so quickly that we still need lots more people to take up the stripey jersey.

I'll probably write a post about being a new referee at some point.