First Talk, Then T - A Basketball Ref's Diary

"Highway to Hell" or "Winter Wonderland"

I had no games to referee, last weekend. Yet, I have a story to tell :-)

I went on a trip out of town for a referee workshop, organized by our national federation, for referee instructors from all over the country. In the past, there was no standard system of training for referees. Every regional and local association had its own approach for the lower levels, resulting in different quality levels and serious misunderstandings when referees from different regions got to work together on higher levels. Only two years ago a commission was set up to design a uniform concept for training and educating basketball referees across the country. The results of this long process were presented to the regional associations a couple of months ago and now every association sent its top instructors to this workshop to learn more about things such as motivation of students, communication in the classroom, psychology of teaching and learning. Of course, not all referee instructors are teachers in their normal lifes, so for most of them this is the hardest part in educating young perople. We all know a lot about being a ref, but we might fail when we have to deal with a stubborn kid ... This weekend was all about "train the trainers".

Unfortunately, most participants' expectations greatly differed from what we got from the people who presented us with their knowledge. We were introduced to theoretical foundations of teaching and learning like motivational theory, constructivism and perception theory, based on which we could develop or improve our own teaching strategies. Most participants, on the other hand, expected to get more practical advice as in "There is a kid who doesn't want to be there and misbehaves. What can I do?" or "How do I start a classroom session and get the kids' full attention?" I found it rather interesting that such simple situations were still a problem for these experienced instructors. As I said, most of them are not teaching professionally, but as far as I know everybody there had at least a couple of years experience in teaching referees. So, while most participants found it was a waste of time, I think it was a great opportunity to learn from very good teachers, who not only handled the criticism in a great way, but also gave new insights into a field, which is helpful not only for teachers, but also for referees in general.

So much about the workshop ... but what about the title of this post? Once again I got a nice car from my local Enterprise station, an all-new Audi A6 Avant. It had only one shortcoming, summer tires, and it was snowing on Saturday. Even on the highways, where they usually clean up everything pretty quickly, there were still or again one or two inches of fresh snow. The thing is, summer tires are made of a different kind of rubber. Winter tires are manufactured from a softer mix of rubber than summer tires. The tire tread is made up of a lot of small tread bars with well-defined cross grooves and longitudinal grooves. Both factors contribute to improve road holding in rain, snow and slush, and they create safer driving conditions. With summer tires on snow it is like putting on inline skates for a figure skating competition on ice. Since we were a party of five and didn't have an alternative to get there, we just did it. We really pushed our luck here, as we found out soon. There was some snow on the highway and at one point I had to jump on the breaks, because a car with a trailer switched into our lane right in front of us, but we didn't have enough traction to slow down. To avoid a crash, I took the other lane, but when we switched between lanes, the tires suddenly completely lost traction and the car went out of control. I don't know how we managed to avoid the crash, but when our car finally came to a halt, everybody was stunned and shocked. I don't have to tell you that from there on we drove like 30 miles per hour and arrived more than 3 hours late for the first part of the workshop on Saturday. On Sunday the snow had melted away, so it was safe to go back, but I will remember this for quite some time.

That's it for now. Next is a game in 1st division. I'm really looking forward to it, because it's still new for me, and a very big challenge!

posted by BBallRef @ 3/14/2006 03:19:00 PM