Football Wagga’s push for increased referee numbers will be reliant on clubs committing to the cause.
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That’s the view of referees manager Jason McKenzie, who is in the process of organising a series of club assistant referee courses ahead of this year’s soccer season.
Wagga City Wanderers’ off-season boost means more than twice as many home games will require local officials and the need for home-grown referees has never been higher.
‘We’re pretty short staffed at the moment,” McKenzie said.
“Even if we sustain the same amount of referees as last year, we’ll still be in a tight spot and there’s usually one or two who drop out or move on every year.
“This year particularly with Wanderers having all their new junior and senior teams means the demand for referees increases again.”
Managing official numbers and workloads has been an ongoing problem for Football Wagga (FWW) with McKenzie calling for new recruits during a shortage in 2017.
The difficulties of retaining the old guard and attracting new talent were further highlighted last year after a string of on-field verbal altercations between referees and players.
However, there’s hope on the horizon.
The widespread development of club assistant referees was pitched by McKenzie in December as the tonic to FWW’s referee ailment and former players are being targeted as officials of the future.
We’ve expanded our dates for training which should be coming out next week and we’ll be taking courses to Tumut and Leeton as well.
- Jason McKenzie
“We’re working through initiatives to attract new refs and manage fatigue and workload for referees,” McKenzie said.
“The last thing we want is refereeing burning out form doing too many games in a row and getting those 50-50 calls wrong in first grade matches.
“Roughly 98% of referees around the country are former players, so we’ll be targeting those kinds of people with experience, particularly the over 35s who we see as ideal targets.”
McKenzie is confident clubs will get behind the club assistant referee programs, which are set to be rolled out across the region.
“We’ve expanded our dates for training which should be coming out next week and we’ll be taking courses to Tumut and Leeton as well.”
“Ideally we’d love to have one assistant referee from each club to help out and I think there’s real benefits in doing the course.”
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