We cannot talk about sports growth without a framework for referee development. Many want to be athletes or footballers, but few want to be referees. Yet no sport can exist without a referee.
At Rangers International Football Club Foundation, through our Beyond The Pitch Initiative, we have opened a fresh chapter of intentional impact. Young minds are mentored and encouraged to venture into sports refereeing and get professionalized, to fill yawning gaps and drive sustainable growth of sports.
Our new thinking through Beyond The Pitch has helped shape this awareness among younger minds in schools and communities, inspiring both male and female to get involved.
Various academies exist in our society for football, for instance, but there is no football referee academy. A football referee academy will ensure growth of the game, referees staying long and growing with age — energetic referees who are true problem-solvers and solution providers with social-emotional learning skills, insulating it from the belief that it is an all-comers affair.
Football refereeing is evolving and innovating and requires an approach tailored to meet the yawning gaps and teething problems. Just as Albert Einstein said that you can’t solve a problem with the same thinking used in creating it, to solve a problem we must present thinking that renders the previous one obsolete.
It is good thinking to champion a football referee academy by the State Football Referees Association. The RIFC Foundation, the first football club foundation, has opened up the thinking and conversations — and also with action.
— Coach Ebere Amaraizu
Olympic Sports Administrator and Manager, Certified NIS Coach
Chairman, Rangers International Football Club Foundation
