The Journey Begins: Officiating

Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire. An angry player can’t argue with the back of an umpire who is walking away. I never questioned the integrity of an umpire. Their eye sight, yes!

God knows how many games of netball I’ve played and watched. A guessdimation may be around 900 league games including indoor leagues and then there is the guesting and filling in for other teams: this does take me to well over a 1000 and this is not counting tournaments or watching my daughter since she started playing. By this rough calculation I would have encountered approximately 450 umpires each with their own take on the game and subjective interpretation of the rules. Without the umpires, many who volunteered in the days before payment, the games quite simply would not have gone ahead.  Was I overly critical of them? Probably at times. But had I ever umpired no so who was I to criticise?

My daughter is now in her sixth year of playing and in order to encourage her further my husband decided he would like to attend an Into Officiating Course. Why had I never done this? Surely, I could umpire? As my playing days are becoming less and less I decided I would attend the course with him and my daughter: I feel it is my time to give something back to the game I love.

Last night I umpired my first match. I can’t even begin to tell you how anxious I was about it…OK it was only year 7’s but I know how critical the ‘netball mums’ can be and if I’m doing a job I want to do it properly. To make it worse I know one of the player’s parents’ really well. I was hugely relieved when I saw that the other umpire was a team mate from my Saturday team and she really reassured me that errors are par for the course and we would be fine.

But then…I grew my first layer of ‘umpire skin’. “My daughter was dreading playing this team” “Yeah, the GK is really pushy and it really upset her last time” Right really?! Was the player’s parent coercing me? Did she want me to respond, “Don’t worry, I’ll look after her!” NO WAY! I was polite and then quickly extracted myself from the conversation after all I had a game to umpire and as the quote above states she couldn’t really argue with my back!

It went really well. A few little nods here and there from the daughter on the sideline reassured me as did my team mate running the other line. I thoroughly enjoyed it, will go back next week and guess what I got a tenner for my troubles.