Anyone who has visited this blog can see that I haven’t
posted anything for a couple years. That’s because after 13 years of coaching
youth soccer I “retired” and shifted my focus to refereeing. While my daughters
ended their soccer career in 2006 when they graduated from high school I
continued coaching at a club and with a friend whose son played in the town’s
recreational program. I enjoyed it but the demands of business travel and
family commitments won out. Rather than pull the plug on this blog I decided to
expand it’s scope to include other sports, primarily tennis and skiing. I
thought about rolling this into my blog on flourishing but some of the things
I’d like to talk about have to do with technique lessons I’ve learned.
Getting back to soccer, I started to referee because I blew
out my knee playing soccer in a men’s pick up game in 2002. (The same year I
got a kidney stone so I call 2002 the Year of Pain.) Torn ACL, PCL and MCL plus a detached hamstring and the muscle
bundle at the top of the fibula. Had to have two cadaver ligaments installed
and the surgeon needed to sever my quad to make a repair behind it then
reattach the quad. The surgery took 6 hours while the rehab took 7 months. I
now have to wear an ACL brace to give my leg lateral stability because the
replacement MCL isn’t as tight as the factory installed MCL. When I asked the
surgeon (whose specialty is knee and shoulder repairs) how my injury rated on a
scale of 1 (minor injury) to 10 (major injury) he said it was a 9 for a sports-related
injury. (!) Still, I was actually thinking of playing again! That was until my
wife threatened to divorce me if I stepped foot onto the pitch again. My
compromise was to get a referee license so that I could still be out on the
field even though I’m not passing or shooting the ball.
It was a good decision. I was still coaching during the
first five years of refereeing so I think seeing things from the player’s
perspective helped me see things differently than standing on the sidelines.
You also hear the players grumbling about what their coaches and parents are
yelling at them. Refereeing gave me the workout I’m looking for but there was
something else: the camaraderie with my fellow referees. I have chosen to
referee just the games in my town’s recreational program where there is a small
pool of referees. And each game typically has three referees assigned: a center
and two assistant referees. As a result we get to know each other. It’s similar
to the camaraderie that I experienced playing in the pick up games.
So what does this have to do with the change in the blog?
Good question! I guess it’s my final installment on a purely soccer-related
subject. In future posts I’ll share my experience trying techniques that don’t
fall into the traditional advice that people are given when they want to learn
to play tennis, ski or even run. As a preview I’ve worked on applying the ideas
of the late Mark Papas at Revolutionary Tennis, Harald Harb’s “phantom move” in
skiing and Danny Dreyer’s chi running which I use when refereeing. Stay tuned!
