The Southern Area Junior Trials were held last weekend. Reaching the top four in their category is now a requirement for players wishing to enter the Nationals now that the Nationals are no longer Open Entry. Trials are therefore being held throughout the country. More on that later.
The event itself was held at K2 in Crawley which is a lovely modern venue. I traveled down from Croydon as I had visited Croydon Judo Club the previous night to train, which incidentally I REALLY recommend as it was a great session. Plus they have so much space I wasn’t even sure where to put myself.
It was a good day and the positive atmosphere really helped with this. To go a whole day refereeing with no contentious problems coming up (the team worked really well together) is excellent, naturally helped by the great attitude of players, coaches and spectators.
We were instructed in the briefing to be particularly ‘hot’ on two issues. Firstly, false attacks. Essentially to stamp out ‘grotty’ judo and time-wasting. Secondly, to call Ippon on behalf of the player when the effects of strangles or arm-locks are obvious. That is always a contentious one as naturally protests of “It wasn’t really on!” could ensue.
Thankfully, this did not come up in our team, apart from one case where a player clearly being arm-locked only gave one tap. Safety first so Ippon called.
The downside of the day was that a player on our mat unfortunately dislocated his elbow. He was clearly in a LOT of pain and distress. We wish him well in his recovery!
From a personal point of view, I was also working on keeping track of attacking moves better to penalise for passivity more quickly where appropriate. Giving the first penalty for this with a minute to go generally means it has been left too late. Give them early (where appropriate!) and get the contest moving. This is also relevant for Golden Score, and happily the vast majority of fights that went to flags ended up unanimous for us.
A point which came up was that I didn’t adjust my positioning quickly enough when we switched from the lighter weights to the ‘big guys’ ! I was too close, nearly got collected, and was essentially chased around the mat. Lesson learned! Give the players room! That’s all part of reading the contest and that will improve with further experience
While this was a great event, it is all part of the big debate on whether returning to the Trials format is a good idea. This event had about 170 players contesting. This meant that there were multiple groups which didn’t even have four players in them to start with, so everyone would auto-qualify anyway. Other Areas have had this worse with only 90 players contesting!
This means that players who could technically not be very competitive AT ALL coming up against squad members at the Nationals and predictably getting stomped on.
The other issue is that the Southern Area has quite a few squad members who are competing against each other for places in the Nationals. There were numerous upsets due to those categories being so contested, with the result that some squad members will not be permitted to enter the Nationals now. Whereas they would have had a fair shot at it with Open entry. Harsh!
There is much debate on this subject on the BJA forums and to be honest it is hard to find anyone actually in favour of the trials…
It will be interesting to see where this one ends up!