Being both an official and a coach lends a unique perspective to each role.  I started refereeing and coaching in the same year and have now officiated up to Junior hockey.  Having coached over the last nine seasons and now in my second year as the head coach of a PeeWee house league team, I know just how frustrating it is to watch a young and inexperienced referee make mistakes that are costly your team.  It is a part of every sport and there is no way out of it.  I remind myself constantly that the kid on the ice is a kid, and he is learning the ropes of officiating.  Reminding myself does not make it any easier to watch my 11 and 12-year-old players getting robbed by an official’s mistakes.  I have to admit, too, that I am a very competitive man and while I accept a fairly fought loss to a stronger opponent, I really love to win.  And if there is one thing I cannot stand, it is losing because my opponent had an unfair advantage.  I try my best not to blame the referees.  I really do.  I try my best to keep cool, coach my team and let the referee do his job the best way he knows how.  I admit that in the past I have failed at that and that in the future I will fail at it again.  Just like the officials on the ice, I am human.

Like I said, I hate to lose unfairly.  This season, my team has had a string of games where we have lost as a result (in part, of course) of calls that should have been made but were not made and calls that should not have been made but were.  Most of the time, those go both ways and even themselves out.  So far this year they have not evened out for us, and it has taken me some time to figure out why.  I had the usual paranoid thoughts that the officials were somehow out to get me, because they know me as an official, or because I am from out of town, or some other reason unbeknownst to me.  I came to my senses quite quickly and started to look for the real problem with what my players were doing on the ice.  What I have finally realized is that the major problem is a difference in coaching ability, coaching philosophy, or some combination of the two, from my team to others’.  While I am an experienced and well-educated coach, essentially a professional, others are volunteers without the same advantages.  While I hold fast to a “spirit of the rule” philosophy, others often support the “whatever you can get away with, but don’t be cheap or really dirty” philosophy.  What happens when you pit these two things against each other?  Well, in a world of perfect referees you get a tough, grinding game with wide-open bursts here and there, lots of turnovers and quick transitions and a brutal battle for the ice in front of the net.  Great hockey, right?  Sure, but put an inexperienced referee on the ice, though, and you have a different game entirely. 

Where our problem has occurred is with obstruction infractions like hooking, holding, and interference.  I hate obstruction passionately.  As far as I am concerned it is simply bad hockey (that is why there are rules against it) but it is a very grey area.  When does holding your ground become actively restraining your opponent?  When does placing your stick on an opponent’s waist become hooking?  When does pinning a man on the boards become holding?  These are hard questions to answer.  Refereeing some good hockey over the last decade has helped me to understand the answers well.  No matter how well I know the answers, I cannot begin to tell you what they are.  They are complex and detailed and are a feel and a code as much as anything.  So I have my answers and my philosophy about the spirit of the rules and how the game should be played and I teach them to my players.  I do not tolerate acts of obstruction by my players.  The result: they do not obstruct.

If after over 16 years of playing and eight of both coaching and officiating I cannot explain to you where the limits and standards are for obstruction, then a young, inexperienced referee certainly cannot be expected to enforce such an intricate code of behaviour.  It is no fault of this referee’s that he is inexperienced.  In fact, by being on the ice he is doing the only thing he can to eliminate that shortcoming.  He cannot gain experience without stepping onto the ice.  Without young refs gaining experience, we would run out of experienced refs pretty fast.  The trouble comes when, while I am teaching my players that code, other coaches are not trying, not able or not aware.  What happens next is that my team goes out on the ice playing clean hockey the way I have taught them, against a team that pushes the rules as far as they figure the referee will let them.  They know they will not get away with the obvious penalties, the impact calls.  Those are the easier ones for referees and our dedicated, young friend in stripes will identify and penalize those infractions.  As a referee, I consider obstruction fouls the hardest to identify, rate, evaluate and ultimately call.  As a coach, my players do not obstruct because I do not let them.  The other team does obstruct because the referee does not yet have the skill to stop them.  They hook.  They hold.  They interfere.  They obstruct.  Not the big, giant, breakaway hooks, but the more discrete stuff.  Predictably, the young man or woman with the whistle does nothing.  I stress to my players that they must not retaliate because we will be the team that ends up short-handed.  They respond well to that logic, but eventually their frustration gets the better of them.  Like the referee and their coach, the kids are human.  They punch.  They whack.  They hack.  These are the easy ones: roughing, slashing, elbowing, etc.  In one game we earned four of these penalties while the other team’s side of the sheet was blank. (save for a coffee stain) We absolutely, without a doubt, no question in my mind deserved all four.  None of them should ever have happened in the first place.  Had the defenceman in front of the net been penalized for interference the second time he knocked over my centreman while the puck was about to pass through the crease, my centreman would not have felt the need to punch the defenceman after the fourth time.  There would have been no fourth time.

Now we know the referee simply is not equipped to deal with the problem, but if we remove him from the ice, he will never acquire that equipment and if that is our policy there will never be referees equipped for the job.  Since the referee is, by no fault of his own, unable to police this problem, he needs a little help from us coaches.  A coach can help a ref just as much as a good linesman.  If the coach of that other team had taught his players how to defend the goal-mouth within the spirit of the rules, maybe that puck would have connected to my centreman’s stick or maybe he would have been held up by the immovable defenceman.  Maybe the defenceman would have been first to the puck and cleared it.  I do not know what would have happened, but I do know what would not have happened: my centreman would not have had to deal with the frustration of being taken to the ice four times in a row, and denied at least two excellent scoring chances.  He would not have felt the need to punch the defenceman and he would not have been penalized.  The other team would not have scored that power play goal.  They might have scored an even strength goal in the next two minutes, but such a goal would have been properly earned.  Losing on merit is a part of sport, and an important one for children to experience.

It is time for all of us to take a step back and look at why we love sport in the first place.  The competition, the energy and exhiliration, the great feeling of winning: these all are reasons why sport is wonderful.  What enables all of the great aspects of sport to exist and what is it about sport that teaches our children so many important life lessons?  It is not the written rules themselves but the spirit of those rules.  The rules were intended as a guideline for mutual respect and a fairly contested match.  These days we see the rules as a list of things we cannot do rather than an explanation of the things we should do.  Watch your kids next time they are playing a pick up game of any sport.  There is no one to enforce the rules, but somehow they get by just fine.  When someone breaks one of the unwritten rules there is some sort of consequence by general consensus.  When the teams are uneven the kids just mix them up so that they have a fair, competitive game.  Kids are a lot more intuitive than we often think they are.  If they can do all of that without any adult intervention or guidance, can we not teach them to approach organized sport the same way?  It is time to stop thinking about what we are not allowed to do on the ice, and start thinking about what we are supposed to be doing!