The middle school volleyball tournament took place on saturday the 27.04.13 in Farlifang. I was there to referee from 7.45 am to 15.00 pm. It has been another new experience for me as I never had the chance to referee a official game. I did it a few times with my friends but those were all very informal events where we were all playing just for fun. This time I was there as the official referee to whom everyone had to listen to. It has been a great experience because even if it can be considered as something really easy and basic it taught me a lot of things. For examples: teamwork and how to manage relationship with other people. First of all the group of helpers was not very big to communication and team work was definitely necessary; we had to communicate in the best way so that in an hour time we would have been able to have all the three courts ready to be used, ready to welcome the schools' teams, and especially we had to be done with our refereeing lesson. In fact Mr Matthews had to teach us the basics of refereeing as many of us did not know all the rules. For me it has been rather easy to remember all the special gesture for each thing that happened in the field, but i have to admit that if at the beginning it all seemed very easy, during the match everything turned out to be harder. This is because the tension raised, you knew that everyone was looking at you and that if you got something wrong people would have come to you and make you notice, and not always in the kindest way. This is where the "learning of how to deal with other people" comes in. Many of the coaches of the hosted teams were really nice and understood that it was our first time refereeing, many other ones did not even accept some little mistakes from our side and came to complain at us. Sometimes being a bit rude as well. It has been a good exercise to maintain our temper, patience, and always be polite even if we knew we were right and the other person was not. Nevertheless we were the referees and we almost had the absolute power on the game. It was therefore important to be ethically correct while judging the events on court and whoever gained the points without begin biased. I loved this experience also because I got to meet new students from the school, I got to play some volleyball with my friends, and I started to organize my time better (e.g. lunch shifts, switching with score keepers, and cheering for our ICS team).
