Back to Breda for our fifth year to the prestigious Push Hockey U18 and U16 tournament.
The reason? To educate, gain exposure & share knowledge. Our commitment to the European education programmes has been to provide all three of these principles and what better way than to expose umpires, coaches and officials to high level competition and let them run the show!
U4E (Umpires 4 Europe) cohort of 2018/2019 now has 40 umpires on the programme. They were all put through their fitness tests last Friday to the FIH standards and were back on the field of play shortly after 8am on Saturday morning as the competition kicked off following a brilliant opening ceremony which the EHF Director General Angus Kirkland attended offering his support and congratulations to all those that had been selected and praising the work of the EHF Umpire Committee Chair Paul Box Grainger and the 7 mentors who put on such a great programme.
From Saturday morning until late on Sunday evening the U4E cohort umpired every game with the added special ingredient of having their umpiring filmed and each umpire receives the film with their chosen EHF mentor recording live feedback over the video. This has been a ground-breaking and essential part of the programme and the development of the umpires.
One outstanding fact is that we have now reached a milestone in the U4E programme whereby 30 different nationalities have been through or are on the programme! This is such a fundamental approach for education sharing different hockey philosophies, cultures and stories as we all continue to learn and improve hockey across Europe.
J4E (Judges 4 Europe)
The Judges programme is a highly successful development programme aimed at developing judges from all over Europe. The programme is planned by the EHF Officials group. The J4E course is designed to encourage the official to think about the implantation of the role within a match, league, event, scenario. It forms part of a 3 tier officiating pathway in Europe. 15 new aspiring officials joint us in Breda this year as they took their learning to new levels with highly interactive and insightful learning from the classroom to the competition venue. Working across half of the competition games over the weekend provided a brilliant balance for practical learning. Rogier Warris chair of the EHF Officiating Committee praised the work and atmosphere that the judges and their educators provided over the weekend “A great success and a big thank you to Ian and Barbara for leading the weekend, it was fantastic to meet everyone and see them starting their journeys.”
Umpire Coaches L1
After a highly successful first edition in 2017 the EHF were proud to continue with this programme, aimed at developing umpire educators across Europe to work with umpires in their own nations. With 7 different national federations in attendance an highly packed weekend included topics surrounding Umpire Coaches ‘approach to coaching’ / ‘let participants explore solutions’ / ‘Setting goals’ / ‘challenging umpires in their comfort zone’ and much more was applied. As participant Yolanda Orange from France stated ‘The seminar is a very good idea and was very interesting, personally I appreciate a lot, a big thanks to Graig, Rob and Thomas.’ Those comments we all echo.
The EHF will send out information for Breda 2019 in March next year. This will go to National Associations who will nominate individuals for the above programmes.
Please email Development & Education Manager, Tom Pedersen-Smith, development@eurohockey.org if you require any further information.