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Priest Elaborates On Umpiring Position

At the end of last week, FootyGoss managed to catch up with Tim Priest, newly appointed Manager of Umpire Development at the WAFC, for some more details on this new position.

Regional umpire development was handled by Umpiring WA for some time, and in recent times Umpiring WA has been renamed to WAFC Umpiring. The goal of this organisation is to provide and co-ordinate consistent professional development, accreditation, training for football umpires in WA. Originally all sectors of football were grouped together, but this is now being re-arranged so that there are different sections in the WAFC Umpiring organisation for handling Seniors, Juniors, and Country level football. This allows for people in that section of WAFC Umpiring to focus exclusively on the needs of that area.

The position that Tim has accepted takes the role of handling the Country section of umpiring development, which will then involve the WACFL at different levels. Tim will be based at the WAFC office in Subiaco, but will use teleconferencing and consultations with the 8 full time regional development managers that are stationed around the country to accomplish his broad role. Primarily this will be to support those 8 full time regional development managers. The end goal is to produce a good match day and Tim believes that a good match day environment will result in keeping the player and umpire talent involved in the game for ongoing seasons. As the umpires are largely in control of the flow of the game, how well the umpires are trained and educated in this will have a large effect on how well the game day pans out.

Tim comments that the “Quality and growth of umpiring ultimately rests in the hands of the people in the region and we are here to provide support to them”. Given the size of the WA state, that support will no doubt involve an even more more broad task range than detailed here in order to realise the goal of helping to produce a consistent good match day experience. Tim is currently involved in co-ordinating the Landmark Carnival. In the end, there will be some 70 umpires brought together from all over the state for the 4 day event in March.