UDP group 7 attended a seminar this past weekend at the EHL Final 4. UDP mentors Carol Metchette and Michiel Bruning guided the UDP group through an exciting weekend of hockey. UDP member Pietro Galligani fills us in on all the action from their seminar.
UDP Group 7 Seminar at EHL Final 4 in 2014!
Eindhoven. Group 7 was in action again. This time the guys led by Carol and Michiel met at the EHL venue, in Eindhoven.
The seminar started on Saturday night when we all met at the hotel to have our dinner during which we talked about our indoor experiences and other umpire stuff.
But the hard work began on Easter Sunday early in the morning: after breakfast we watched all together for the first time the videos recorded during the practice week-end in the Netherlands in November.We had a very interesting discussion about some issues that came up in Jaros, Ymkje and Pietro’s games: it’s very helpful to check our performances after the fact, while sitting on a chair and in slow motion, we can see things that we could not see during the match.
Then we reached the venue to watch the semifinal between RC Bruxelles and Harvestehuder THC: our job during the match was to recognize the different whistle tones that Roel and Marcin used.
At the end of the match we joined Michiel Otten (member of our group) who was appointed as video umpire for that match; we had the fortune to visit the truck where TV control panel were situated guided by Michiel who showed us how the “TV machine” works during a game. The truck was full of screens and buttons!
After lunch we watched the other semifinal (the host team Orange Zwart versus the Belgians KHC Dragons) from a VIP stand…probably because we met just a few moments before the President of FIH Leandro Negre, the President of EHF Marijke Fleuren, the vice-president of EHF Jorge Alcover and the Director General of EHF Angus Kirkland!
We had a short discussion about UDP Program and our goals for the future. The match was umpired by Martin Madden from Scotland and Christian Blasch from Germany. And the very interesting thing is that we had the luck and the privilege to have a post-match meeting with them! They joined us at the hotel hall and they answered all our questions about the match: it was a real honour to take advice from such experienced umpires as Martin and Christian. Then we checked our “whistle tone list” and we compared how EHL umpires dealt with different fouls and disciplinary situations and how we deal with them.
And to finish the day in the better way we joined all umpires and officials for dinner in a restaurant close to Eindhoven, where we continued to discuss our plans and were able to ask them everything we could think of about umpiring!
The day after (the 21st of April) Michiel and Carol had a 15 minute talk with each of us about our Personal Development Plan: one by one we explained to them our impressions after one year of UDP and what we expect from the upcoming summer, because we all have at leat one appointment So we’re very active!
And then it was time for hockey: we joined the EHL umpires to watch the bronze medal match and the gold medal match, which were both extremely exciting. There were 3 UDP umpires appointed for this tournament: Marcin Grochal from group 1 and Jakub Mejzlik from group 5 plus Michiel Otten of group 7.
It was a great week-end, where we met a lot of friends and colleagues and were lucky to watch high level hockey with high level umpiring.