At the beginning of 2021, the Referee Committee (RC) of Polish Floorball Federation launched a new system for Referee Observing. Polish RC starts with four observers and eight candidates who, after completing the training, will join the group of observers.
– So far, the observations were spontaneous. Our most experienced referees, when they were not nomination at weekend, went to matches of other referees, sat in the stands and obverved the match. They try to note or keep in mind any comments during the match in order to pass them on to referees pair, says Wojciech Czarnecki, Chairman of the Referee Committee in Poland.
The first serious observation took place during the Super Final in 2019, when Maciej Konieczka acted as a Observer during all four matches. Maciej is a person highly involved in the activities of the Referee Committee, initially as a Referee, but with his very fast development, after 2-3 seasons, he began to conduct Referee training and worked on other activities of the RC.
In the new structure of the Referee Committee, Maciej was elected as Head of Development and Rules Commission. This season, he focused on creating a fully online and interactive Referee Course, and now he has started working on another project, which is the standardisation of the observation system and training of observers. Furthermore, IFF has nominated Maciej Konieczka as an IFF Observer for the years 2021-2022.
The observation system is the result of hard work over the last few months. It was necessary to prepare a coherent vision of the role observers in Referees training. Prepare system of selection observers and also path for their development. All these elements are equally important to make real impact by improving the level of referees.
– For the entire Referee Committee, the time of the coronavirus is a period of very intensive work. We wanted to take full advantage of the time where there are less matches and focus on the vision of development for the next few years. We are already starting to make this vision a reality and we are already seeing the positive effects of our changes. We hope that after a break of more than a year, sport will finally return to normal, I am very happy that we could turn this difficult time into successes, Maciej Konieczka comments.
Source: Polish Floorball Federation
