Back Ten for Chatting!

I refereed my first match on Saturday! My roommate and I both traveled to College Station, TX to referee our first matches! She refereed the UT Grads vs the College Station B side men’s game and I officiated over the Rice A side vs Texas A&M B side women’s match.

It was AWESOME! The first ten minutes was total chaos, at least in my mind. 🙂 The game was moving along but I found myself in the way and second guessing myself. Towards the twenty minute mark I realized that I just needed to calm down and do what I know to do! After I calmed down I felt much better and I felt like I was able to positively manage the game.

My “adviser” if you will, Chris was giving Meg and I tips and guidelines based on our performance and it was really helpful. He really explained a lot of the finer points of where to stand, tone of voice, whistle volume and more. He even nicknamed me “smiles!”

So for my first match to officially referee, a SUCCESS! Chris said that Meg and I did fabulous jobs and made big improvements after halftime. It was especially hard for me to adjust as I am SO used to approaching every ruck as a scrumhalf…I was often too close and in the way. I had to think the whole time I was approaching, get to the side the ball is on, get to the side! It was a ton of fun though! I can’t wait to referee my next match!

So today I am working on the bible for the St. Louis match and I am really excited about this match. We have been working really hard in practice the last two weeks and have been non=stop talking about rugby! The House of WAM (where I live) is always abuzz with rugby…its awesome!

The image at right is a Google Maps image where you can see the Gateway Arch! Look closely, its the silver part, the shadow is more discernible than the actual arch. Pretty cool!

So we play the St. Louis Sabres on Saturday (Oct 6, 2007) and most of the team is flying in Saturday morning. We did this because most of us paid over $250 to fly to Denver two weeks ago, so we needed a cheap alternative. Most of us got flights to St. Louis for under $175…not bad! So we will see how a Friday night drive to Dallas and EARLY flight to St. Louis works.

So as a result most of the team is staying Saturday night and I have been checking out food places, bars etc downtown…so we an experience a bit of St. Louis while we are there. Have any suggestions of somewhere to eat or drink? Leave it in the comments!