Over 50 umpires and mentors from the Umpires for Nations, Umpires for Europe and Umpires Development Programme came together for a bumper Easter weekend at Club an der Alster in Hamburg, Germany.
The nature of the weekend’s activities allowed each group to interact and learn from each other’s experiences to augment their respective development path.
Umpires took part in classroom activities on the Friday evening, Saturday morning and Sunday morning and watched games at Club an der Alster on Saturday afternoon.
During those games, they were tasked to keep track of the “golden game management moments” when watching the women’s EuroHockey Club Trophy I tournament.
On Sunday, the U4N and U4E umpires also had the pleasure of debriefing the match with one of the umpires, Pauline Cuypers, who is also a current UDP umpire.
U4N and U4E covered topics including the pre-match chat, rules knowledge – including a rules test video quiz – presentation and positioning and the art of communication.
For the UDP, their focus was on topics including high performance technical knowledge, efficient work with Umpire Managers, technological systems and reflected on their past year in umpiring and looked ahead towards their summer appointments.
For U4N and U4E, this was the first seminar of the year, with the second taking place in Breda in August.
For UDP, this is also the first seminar of the year, with the second taking place at the EHL KO16 in October.
Reflecting on the weekend, Spain’s Nuria Casalé says her inclusion on the U4E programme has given her a “glimpse of what an international career” in umpiring looks like and feeds her hunger to pursue it.
She has been umpiring for six years up to Honor División level in Spain before moving to the Netherlands where she has taken on a number of Hoofdklasse fixtures.
“I’m starting to develop my full personality as an umpire while working on my goals. In that context, the EuroHockey courses will help me to keep growing and improving, as the feedback I can receive from mentors and umpires provides a different perspective than what I’m used to.”
As for specific items which helped her from the weekend in Hamburg, she added: “I particularly enjoyed the discussions in the mentor groups, where we could work on different topics such as pre-match preparation, expectations of a tournament.
“In addition, it was very nice to get to meet umpires from other countries, share experiences and discuss a lot about hockey!”
Opportunity
Likewise, Lucien Vanderborght said the weekend was a great opportunity to meet and get to know many of the umpires he may well be whistling with in the future.
He added: “I found the weekend very interesting, because we didn’t just stick to theory, but really analysed matches and video clips. On top of that, it’s always interesting to discuss things and you notice that we rarely have the same point of view!”
He is currently 21 and umpiring in the Belgian men’s Honor Division. His beginnings in the role started with his sister’s matches in tandem with his father.
“At first, he whistled fouls and I pointed in the right direction! As the weekends went on, I gained more and more experience and started whistling on my own!”
He passed his theoretical and practical exams to become an umpire for his federation and started in September 2016.
He is now in his third season at the top level in Belgium and is keen to use this course to advance his skills further.
“What I hope to learn from these training courses are mainly meetings with other referees, with umpire coaches, etc. I also hope to tackle subjects that we don’t think of directly when we think of refereeing, such as the mental and physical aspects.”
Find out more
To find out more about the EuroHockey umpiring pathway and educational routes, click here
