About me:

1. SOCCER HISTORY: I am currently a Maryland Grade 7 Referee, Grade 7 Instructor, and Grade 7 Assessor. started refereeing soccer in 1997 in Utah. I was a coach at that time (rec, but with a Class “E” license), and was feeling frustrated because the referees, who were mainly teenagers, seemed inconsistent in their involvement in the game and in their interpretation of the “rules". So, I took the rec-referee course.
2. I was immediately contacted by the assignor (I got the highest score in the class!) asking when I could do games. After the first few games, I realized that I really enjoyed being out there - it put me much more into the game than I ever could be as a coach.
3. In fact, although my rec team was very good, I found that I took their loses too hard. I knew that, as a referee, I would always lose; but, knowing that from the beginning, I found I didn’t take that “losing” nearly as personally. Therefore, I left coaching and turned to refereeing for my “soccer fix”.
4. Because I started refereeing at age 45, I knew I would never make it to the FIFA level. For a number of years, I thought I would aim for State - primarily so I could assess and instruct at that level. However, a few years of increasing physical infirmities and the realization that I really didn’t enjoy refereeing those amateur games (I believe that amateurs need baby-sitters more than they need a referee), I recently gave up that ambition, and will be content to remain as a Grade 7 (or 8) as long as possible.
5. I have refereed at least 2,500 matches in my 15+ years at a variety of levels. I have refereed State Cup and Regionals, and Amateur Regionals. I have refereed amateur teams with semi-professional players, and the O-50 “former greats” (at least in their mind). I have refereed at a number of local and regional tournaments, and went 5 times to the USACup, which was a wonderful experience back then, with hundreds of teams and referees from other states and countries. There, I worked with referees from many different countries (ranging from Canada to England, Brazil, and New Zealand) and many different levels of experience (ranging from the brand-new local to the professional-level and former FIFAs). I still am able to do Region 1, pre-academy, academy, USA Club, and ENCL matches. I primarily do youth games now, and am getting special pleasure from bringing my experience and style to recreational matches as well as our local competitive leagues. I have stayed away from NISOA and NF games because of the rule differences and (at least for the NF matches) conflict with my day-job schedule.
6. BEFORE REFEREEING: I didn’t play much before I became a coach. I played “varsity” Chess in high school and intercollegiate Rugby in college (UC San Diego). I did play some pick-up and intramural soccer while in college. I spent two years in Germany as an undergraduate; I watched the 1974 Germany-Netherlands World Cup Final in a dorm room in Germany. There, I did play some more pick-up games, including with some members of the U-20 German National Team (sometimes I “conveniently forget” to mention that I was playing volleyball with the U-20 National players, not soccer). I came back from Germany to go to graduate school (again at UC San Diego), and continued to play intercollegiate rugby, intramural volleyball, and squash.
7. PHYSICAL ISSUES: I tore my ACL in a rugby match 1976, blind-sided by a teammate after the referee had blown the whistle to stop play - this is one of the reasons my mentoring/assessing comments will usually mention the volume and “attention getting” qualities of the referee’s whistle. They didn’t repair ACLs back in the Dark Ages; so, after the swelling had gone down, I tried to get back into rugby - I lasted three more games before I got hit again. I had to give up rugby at that point; however, I continued playing volleyball and squash for the next 30 years. Finally, my right knee is now bone-on-bone; in fact, that knee has lost so much cartilage that my right leg is 4 mm shorter than my left leg. As a result, my hips became tilted, causing rotation in the L5-S1-S2 region of my lower spinal cord, which started pinching the sciatic nerve in my left leg. A simple 4 mm heel lift in my right shoe corrected the tilt, and resolved the left sciatic nerve issue. However, the heel lift created a compression of a metatarsal nerve branch, causing pain in the right foot toes. An insert in the right place has helped with that.
8. MY DAY-JOB: I am a scientist, with a PhD in Neurosciences. After finishing my doctorate and too many years of additional post-doctoral training, I took a faculty position at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO. After ten years in Fort Collins (both of my sons are Fort Collins natives), I moved to a faculty position at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City, UT. During all of this time, I was primarily a bench scientist - performing experiments, analyzing data, publishing the results in scientific journals. I was largely supported by grant funding from the National Institutes of Health. I realized around 2001 that competing for these increasingly competitive research grants was becoming more risky, and decided to make a minor career shift - I moved to Maryland to join the National Institutes of Health as a Health Science Administrator (I moved from the lab bench to the office desk), where I now run scientific review meetings with university scientists to help NIH decide which grant applications would be most likely to have a significant impact on our understanding of basic biomedical science, and ultimately public health.
9. I draw some interesting parallels between my various day-jobs and refereeing. As a scientist, I am supposed to be an objective observer and an impartial judge of cause-and-effect - same with refereeing. When I am running my scientific review meetings, I am there to observe and to make sure no one violates the rules (Federal Advisory Committee Act and DHHS/NIH Policy), and only intervene when that happens - same with refereeing; although some proactive involvement is useful in both cases, I am not there to influence the outcome of the scientific discussion, or the outcome of the soccer match. Both are short, intense time periods with a lot riding on the outcome. Both can involve substantial amounts of money: parents in some youth matches seem to believe their child’s future college scholarship is riding on this one match (even at the U10 level!); in the scientific review meetings, we discuss $500 million to $1 billion in grant requests each year, and people’s careers DO depend on the committee’s decisions.