New Officials Clinic:

St. James Academy Wrestling Room
Thursday, August 29th 6:30 pm - (pizza order at 6:45)
$10 - Pizza will be served and bottled water

Clinicians - Ryne Cokeley, Jeremy Struemph, Craig Ewert

What will be covered?

How to register with KSHSAA & USAWKS

Contacting tournaments for work

What to wear and where to get it

How to score a match - proper mechanics

Pointers on dealing with passionate parents and coaches

Mock matches and a chance for you to go through the procedure of scoring a match.

We are targeting HS and College wrestlers or former wrestlers to feed the tournaments.

What time?

6:30 pm

We will order the Pizza at 6:45 when we see how many we have. We would like to see 25 future officials in attendance.

It's a shame Bo is gone away to college. He is looking for reffing jobs this season.

But this is a great idea.

Mike Pursel

Duh. Reading comprehension isn't my strong suit. Didn't notice that time at the top.

USAWKS will reimburse the $47 it takes to register with KSHSAA if you are a first time official. This is an excellent offer for those rookies who are going to be attending this meeting!!

The USAWKS helping to pay for the registration costs is a good deal and a clinic for referee wannabes is a really good idea; topics being covered are definitely pertinent. KUDOS to Will and to whoever else is behind this.

I agree! Now we need to do something similar via scholarships for our grads who are education majors in college. This would have the intent of funneling more young men into coaching.

Greg & Greg,

Thanks for your support.

Greg02, I LOVE that idea. Can you put together a proposal and email it to me? I would go to the Kansas College Wrestling Fund with that proposal. Would you want to require that you coach in Kansas for two years after graduating or you have to pay it back? We NEED our good college wrestlers to return to Kansas and raise the bar at the HS level.

Great clinic last night. Jeremy, Ryne, and Craig did a great job educating the group.

Big shout out to Will for getting this started and paying for the pizza.

My personal challenge to all kids club tournament directors is to please make sure you include these high school kids as refs in your tournaments. It is the next logical step in this process and helps them to get experience. Thanks in advance!

To kids club coaches.....I offered the high schoolers at the clinic a standing invitation to attend our kids club practices so they can practice their reffing skills. If they take me up on it, what I plan on doing is having a practice filled with live matches for our little kids and let the high school kids ref them in a no threat environment. Just an idea that we can use to let these kids get confidence before the crazy Sat and Sun tournaments.

Thanks again to Will for getting this idea off the ground! Great job as always.

Shawn Budke

Shawn Budke

Great idea Shawn! Thank you to Jeremy, Ryne, Craig, Coach Medina and Will.

Support our crop of young refs!!

Just want to again thanks the folks for putting on this ref clinic for our younger kids. Having said that I have been thinking of some ideas and would like your feedback.....

In order to grow our sport is there a way that we can grow our young officials? Here are some of my ideas....

1. Make these clinics a regular occurance at various times and locations around the state (similar to Bronze clinics). It seems that this could be a program that is ran and controlled our official representatives on the corporate board and on the kids executive board.

2. At these clinics we could have rules books to give the students. We could have 4-6 computers there so they could register and then we could have another meeting a couple of weeks later to take the test.

3. We could develop a mentorship program so that our experienced refs could work with our younger refs and pass on their wisdom and experience. Example: If I am hosting a tournament that needs 12 refs then I would hire 1 head ref with 1-2 experienced refs that would not actually ref during the tournament but they would mentor the younger refs (refs with less than 3 years of experience). Personally I would then hire 8-10 young refs (especially for a Novice tourney).

The mentors would provide on site feedback to the young officials and they would provide them formal feedback on a standardized form. Our soccer association does that with young soccer refs and it is a wonderful program. They have a pool of 30-40 youth referees (High school age students) because of this mentorship program.

I also think we could check into the state possibly rewarding tournaments that implement the ref mentorship program by paying at least half for the mentor fees.

These are just some of my thoughts over the past couple of weeks. Would appreciate any feedback or other ideas.

This clinic was a great opportunity for our high schoolers and it is a great way to continue to grow our sport and keep kids active in it as they grow.

Shawn Budke