New Approach to Allocating and Developing Referees

Auckland Water Polo has been trialling a new way of allocating and supporting the development of our referees through the recent Under 14 League.

Our AWP referee representative, Fred Oloapu, has initiated bringing the Auckland referees from across all the clubs together into a single, large pool and establishing a leadership group of our more senior and experienced referees.

From there, the leadership group has assigned referees to games, seeking to balance the location preferences of our referees and ensuring games are officiated by a blend of experience, pairing a B grade referee with a newer C grade referee where possible. This is all about ensuring consistency in refereeing of games, and building the confidence, experience and capability of our less experienced referees.

The program is a work-in-progress, and AWP will be reviewing the approach and looking at improvements around effective communication systems with our referees, as well as structured courses to progress referee learning and development, assessment and grading.

Fred says “AWP wants to give a huge vote of thanks to Hamish MacDonald, Ryan McEwen and Daniel Cameron, as they have been the mainstay of the programme to date.”