Hopefully, this site is pretty straightforward.

There are two main subdivisions: Clips and Animations.

My Clips:

All video clips in the basic library "Search Clips" have been extracted from broadcast matches, the vast majority of which are professional/international matches, which are, unfortunately, somewhat different from the matches most of us referee. However, there are lessons to be learned in almost any match that can be applied to almost any other match, if you look carefully enough. All video clips have some analysis associated with them as well as “tags”, or keywords, which define why a referee might be interested in watching the clip. All tags should be easy to identify - if you don't understand the terms used in the tags, perhaps you are on the wrong site. The only exception might be "YMTC", which stands for "You Make The Call".

The primary screen is the Search screen. You can use the drop-down menus at the top to search by Team, Competition, or Tag. Combining criteria (e.g. selecting a Team and a Tag) requires both criteria to be satisfied. The hits are listed at 10 per page. You can also run a search by clicking on a team name, competition, or tag in the individual clip listings. Clicking on the “Search the Library” tab at the top will run a search without criteria - shows all clips.

You can also select a Sort method for displaying the clips. The default is by Date (most recent matches first). You can also sort by Competition, or by the date the clip was included in the database - this will put recent additions at the top of the list. Sorting does not change the search, only the order in which they are displayed. In order to sort, you need to select your Sort type and click on “Submit Query”.

The “YMTC” tag is a little special. For these clips, I don't provide any initial analysis- you must click on the “Peter says:” text to see my analysis. These clips will also include an “Extended” version of the clip with additional camera angles, slow-motion, or graphics to allow you to understand my analysis.

Clips are provided in .mv4 (.mp4) format. They are provided at 2 different levels of resolution. The “Lower” version is the smallest, the fastest to load and play, and the poorer quality clip, at 360-480 lines. The “Higher” Resolution clip will be either 480 lines or 720 lines. Clips captured at high definition (720 lines)will be labelled with an “HD” label on the thumbnail.

I've added a "Comments" section to allow you to comment on the clip or my analysis. Please remember to be nice - you can be blunt without being rude. I reserve the right to edit or delete comments as I deem necessary.

Other Clips:

I also have labelled some clips as “Favorite Clips”. Some of these will be the newest situations being discussed on SocRef-L. There are also collections (coming) of clips organized by theme “My Points of Emphasis”.

In addition, I must acknowledge the vast resources out on the Internet, and have included (under “Other Resources”) both some collections of YouTube videos (collected earlier, and generally lower resolution, but worth watching). I've also included a section of single clips from various sources that I find of value (either for humor or for instruction).

Other Sports:

Because of my background as a Rugby player (in an earlier age), I've included information about various forms of Rugby; some of the clips are of general referee interest. They are under “Other Resources”.

The Animations:

There are two animation pages. The “Offside Teaching Tool” has some Flash animations I developed to help teach Law 11 to entry-level classes. You can run the animations directly from the website or download the entire package as a zip file for your own use. The Main Menu page of the animation set includes a link to built-in instructions, and there is a PDF Help file in the zip package. Note - at the moment, you must use the back arrow on your browser to return to the main website.

The other animation page is under construction. So far, this is just a vision. I want to have a utility feature on this site that will allow users to sketch out a scenario by placing players, referee, and ball icons on a field diagram at several time points in a scenario, and then smoothly move those “characters” between time points. We have had a number of discussions on SocRef where the text descriptions, even with text-based “graphics”, have not been clear enough to everyone, resulting in a discussion wandering about as everyone interprets the description in a different way, and no one can visualize how another participant is visualizing the situation. Hopefully this utility could reduce that sort of confusion.

Hopefully, this is all the information you need to navigate through the site and utilize all of its features. If you have suggestions, corrections, or any other feedback on how to make the site more valuable to the referee community, please don't hesitate to contact me. My contact information is on one of the “About” sub-pages.