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Training Camp is Reckoning Time |
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Follow Paul on Twitter: @PaulStewart22
The end of summer is the time of year when hockey training camps are upon us, for officials as well as for players. "Training camp," though, is actually an antiquated term. If you wait until now to train in earnest for the season, you're already too late. Long gone are the days of scrambling to shake off the summer barbecue and beer weight and to skate for the first time since the spring.
Every year at camp, there is attrition and it starts quickly. That's especially true at camps for prospective officials. Time commitment, lack of availability, the demands of spouses, significant others and parenthood force some folks to reluctantly step aside. In other cases, substandard performance is the candidate's undoing.
Weigh-in in part of registration, and there are always some nervous people. The bane of some candidates' existence is death by buffet. They have to make a choice between whether they care more about their whistle or their utensils. Being out of shape is deadly to one's job hopes in the modern officiating profession: there's no sugar-coating it (haha).
Officiating hockey is a marathon, not a sprint. Job candidates have to be ready.
If you aren't in shape, your skating suffers. Iif you can't skate with vigor, your positioning suffers. If you are not physically strong enough to take a bump and push off, you risk injury. If your core strength is challenged with an overhanging or flabby stomach:
A) you will likely develop back issues if you don't already have them, and
B) you will look like a fat person on the ice and that's not the image we want.
We pay for their talent for officiating the game, their travel, their commitment. They have to do their part to be ready to do the job.
At camps we've run in the ECAC, we quickly put the candidates through skating tests: three minutes, circle to circle with a minimum of ten laps. The candidates also go fourth-lengths of the ice backwards, from a dead stop, V-stop at the goal line, turn and come back. Times should be 40 to 50 seconds.
As part of fitness testing, there are one-minute pushup and one-minute situp tests. We look for a minimum of 30 bonafide push-ups and sit-ups apiece.
Today's game is ultra fast-paced. Those on the officiating side, correspondingly, have to maintain the same high standards to keep the pace. From the NHL on down the line, the physical fitness demands nowadays are markedly higher than they were even in the late 1990 and are like night and day compared to the era when I was a pro player and young official -- when my own physical fitness level was well above-average for that era but would be nothing special transposed onto today's standards.
If everyone could do this job, we would have more people trying out and sticking to it. It takes someone special and a special kind of athlete to officiate hockey. Now let the games begin!
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Paul Stewart holds the distinction of being the first U.S.-born citizen to make it to the NHL as both a player and referee. On March 15, 2003, he became the first American-born referee to officiate in 1,000 NHL games.
Today, Stewart is the director of officiating for the ECAC. He has been with the ECAC since 2007.
Blogger •Former NHL Referee • 
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