John Holt Camp

[RCBSports]

Before I get into the whole camp, I thought I give some insight about myself. First off, I am 16 years of age. I love refereeing and have worked a lot of games. Credit though, it's only YMCA or a few Middle/High summer games, that both work a two man crew. So a friend of mine, who too is a referee, said "Hey, you gotta come to this camp...since you love to referee, you can learn a lot of become better and get in the WVIAC.

Anyway, we had games off and on through the day. 75 were the maximum officials that were allowed to attend; had seven courts, 2 twenty minutes halves, and a lot of team. Each official was assigned a number and the rest of the boring stuff you don't need to know.

Anyway, I learned a lot. First game I worked like any other game. At the end of first half, he said 'try doing this' or 'do this instead'. We had MANY different observers. I was actually pleased to have different ones because not observers watch for the same thing. So I took all the things they said, tired them out in the second half and most of the time it worked out. Then if I didn’t quite get it, or it wasn’t on my list of things to work on, on THAT game, I wrote it done and would do it the next game.

From the beginning to when the camp was over, I felt that I personally improved my game to about 30-40 percent. I learned A LOT. Mostly I had trouble on three man rotations, since I really haven’t worked three man too much, and a few things here and there, such as not be loud enough.

I may write down a little briefing on what I learned, but at the moment, I just wanted to say I learned a lot. I have to thank the John Holt camp in West Virginia and to all the observers who helped me out and better improved on how I played the game.