MIAMI, Florida – This week Concacaf and the Concacaf Refereeing Department is pleased to announce the launch of the Concacaf Center of Refereeing Excellence.
The Concacaf Center of Refereeing Excellence will provide referee education for all FIFA Referees, Instructors and Assessors from Concacaf’s 41 Member Associations via an online portal and will include various features including video analysis training, discussions boards and presentations from Concacaf courses and programs.
“We always talk about providing our referees with more tools and this will allow us to do that on an annual basis when our referees and assessors are not in classes and instructors are not in classes and the MA needs help,” said Concacaf Director of Refereeing Brian Hall. “This allows us to engage them on a continual basis to challenge them and ultimately provide uniformity in interpretation and application of the laws of game management and player management on the field of play,” added Hall.
The Center of Excellence will include several key features, including analyzing video clips, plus discussion forums for various refereeing groups within Concacaf.
“Some of the things we’ll be doing is video clip analysis training. Whenever we have a course, we have videos quizzes, we show X number of video quizzes and the referees provide their answers and then after we have all the answers, we analyze it and we go back and discuss the ones that were not so clear for everyone.
“Say for example I’m in El Salvador and I have a controversial decision on the field of play. I can send a video clip to Concacaf in a discussion group and we can all analyze it and come up with an official interpretation that can help all referees around the Confederation, not just El Salvador, and give them a better grasp on decision-making.
“We can also have discussion groups on the laws of the game, discussion groups on sports science, fitness and nutrition, discussion groups for women referees. We can create a forum for the heads of referees in the Member Associations,” said Hall.
The roll-out of the Center of Excellence will occur in phases with Concacaf’s top referees receiving priority access to the portal until eventually all of the referees, instructors and assessors throughout the 41 MAs have access. Once the roll-out is complete, those referees will have access to the kind of information that was previously only readily available by attending courses or programs on-site.
“For example, if we have a presentation on positioning and movement, we can take the PowerPoint presentation, put it on our Center of Excellence and anyone can download it. We can also videotape the instructor giving the actual presentation, so now an MA instructor has a completed presentation and also the message as it was delivered by the expert instructor so then I know what the key points that I need to deliver when I present this to my domestic referees,” said Hall.
In addition to the Center of Excellence, the Concacaf Refereeing Department also plans to launch a Concacaf Center of Refereeing Excellence channel on YouTube that will include training videos with voice and video clips which fans will be able to access.
It is all part of Hall’s objective to raise the level of excellence of refereeing in the region
“For the last three years, our referees have worn a shirt that has the word “Excellence” written on the sleeve, and this is our goal: excellence in everything that we do, so we want to use this Center to help drive them to further fulfill our objective of excellence. This is the first time this is being done by an organization within Concacaf and I’m really proud. The fact that we’re going to be providing a tool to the entire referee family that we hope makes their job easier. It makes brings them one step closer to excellence and gives us ongoing interaction with people who are regularly asked to direct games,” concluded Hall.
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