Setting The Right Tone For The New Season

Pre-season begins tomorrow (July 1st)! Are you feeling ready? Your success and attitude towards the season ahead is entirely within your control. Are you ready to make 2023/24 your best season yet?

The vast majority of referees enter new phases fuelled by “external motivations.” Whether it’s a fear of getting demoted, a dread about how much of your free time is about to get taken up, or a knowing that they have to do some painful, challenging things in order to get ready for the first day of the season, these officials seem to be motivated by moving away from something unpleasant rather than moving towards something pleasurable.

“If I don’t do all this conditioning, I won’t pass the fitness test. I hate having to do these stupid weights, they’re such a waste of time.”

It’s this kind of negative motivation that will ensure that you get the very least from your training efforts. However, if you go into the season actually wanting to train, looking forward to and being driven internally by your own goals and dreams, then you will, by far, get the very most out of your natural abilities.

So what’s your attitude going to be towards this season? How are you going to approach your training sessions? A positive one will make it turn in the right direction and take you as far as you’d like to go. A negative attitude will spin out of control, move you away from your goals and leave you worse off. In these Third Team Blogs I have often stated the importance of training with a matchday mindset as it only benefits you when adversity comes along.

“Have you examined your attitude recently?”

If there’s one thing that Referee Managers & coaches at every level really want, it’s referees with great attitudes. More than tremendous ability, great mental strength, solid conditioning, or even an in-depth tactical understanding of the game, an official’s attitude can make or break their ultimate success as a referee. This is one of the reasons why the best officials don’t always come out on top. Attitude is what equates to success. Referees who work hard, are willing to learn and can take constructive feedback, work well in an officiating team, are positive, enthusiastic and passionate about refereeing do the job with considerably greater ease.

On the other hand, selfish, cocky, primma donnas who think they have all the answers, who are unwilling to take constructive feedback, who are only concerned with being seen out in the middle, who are disrespectful to club officials and players, and who are brimming with negativity which they always tend to “share” with everyone around them can make your life a living hell and get you considering that early retirement from something you, too, love doing. After a while, talent becomes less and less important when compared with attitude. Great officials with rotten attitudes don’t help their colleagues and certainly don’t earn promotions or appointments to cup finals.

However, as you read these words, how often have you had the courage to take an honest look at yourself in the mirror? How often to you question your interactions with your Referee Manager/coach? How much responsibility do you take when things go wrong? When a referee has a persistent and annoying performance problem, do you look to yourself first or blame yourself for being a “headcase?”

As you know, modelling is by far your most powerful and effective tool. It’s how you carry yourself on the field of play and who you are as a person in your day-to-day interactions with your Referee Managers/coaches and colleagues. Sure your knowledge of the Laws of The Game is crucial, but your actions and behaviours always speak so much louder and more forcefully than your words. In the end, what you have to say is totally worthless if your attitude demeans or alienates your Referee Managers/coaches and colleagues when you’re saying it. What you have to say will always fall on deaf ears if your behaviours consistently contradict your words.

Last year, I began working with a group of referees. It was explained to me that the Referee Coaches weren’t really interested in what we were going to be doing because they didn’t believe in any of this “mental nonsense.” As a result they never came to any of our 6 sessions over the course of the season. I doubt that they knew what their closed mindedness was modelling for the group of referees.

In private, the newly appointed Referee Manager explained to me that the team of coaches he had inherited were incredibly negative; always putting the officials down and just outright not doing their jobs. They weren’t coaching them. Many simply yelled and swore at the referees for what they did wrong in their fixtures and offered no constructive or positive feedback. In our sessions, the officials expressed this and the coaches failure to listen to and support their development. They had no confidence and felt that the coaches didn’t really believe in them. Furthermore, they felt frustrated by their refusal to accept any kind of feedback from them and felt hopeless to change the situation.

As much as I may possess some answers as a Referee Performance Consultant & Educator, I felt I was only scratching the surface of this one. Truth be told, just like those of the referees and the Referee Manager, my efforts were met with resistance from the start because the coaching team was negative, closed minded and completely unaware of the impact of their words and actions on those around them. They simply walked around on a daily basis completely out of touch with the reality of the situation! They had absolutely no idea what was really going on for their officials and seemingly didn’t really care. How else can we explain their attitude and behaviours? As a referee you certainly wouldn’t want this kind of coach to be leading you. How can you expect to be successful, when your coaches’ conduct themselves in this manner? This is not a successful attitude!

As your new season starts, how about a good dose of courage? Courage to be self-aware enough to take an honest look at who you are in relation to your colleagues and those you look up to with the aspiration of developing. Courage to be open minded. Courage to be open to feedback from those around you, even if you don’t like the feedback. Nobody can achieve a high level of success without introspection. Nobody can reach their goals without self-awareness. Nobody can develop a successful attitude without feedback! Remember, feedback is the key that unlocks a new level of performance out in the middle!

At The Third Team I work individually and in collaboration with different professionals where I have developed workshops and 1-2-1 sessions associated with Resilience and Mental Toughness Development to help referees. The workshops and 1-2-1 sessions are interactive, where referees are encouraged to open up and share their experiences to help themselves and each other.

Feel free to contact me if you’d like to know more about my workshops or 1-2-1 sessions and how I could help you or your officials.

Best Wishes,