One of the features, perhaps the responsibilities, of big tournaments is to develop good refereeing.
The quality of referees at major rugby events and tournament is crucial to having good competition. At the NAI 7s, they went a bit further this year, running a series of educational talks and development activities for the referees on the Thursday before the tournament started on Friday. The plan, said Andre Bruwer, who conceived and coordinated it, was to have refs pay their own way to Utah but come a day early. Then funds set aside for the refs would be used for the ref development.
Referee reps from Major League Rugby, WPL, and USA Rugby participated. Referees had some classroom time and also went outside. They even got a fitness test.
Teams checking in on Thursday afternoon saw the referees running the Bronco in the heat.
What that did was show the players that the referees were working hard, too. And it translated on the field. Yes, we can talk about the negative things that happened at the NAI 7s, and in fact GRR will address those in a separate piece of content, but the negative stuff all came from coaches and "fans." The players were respectful of the referees, even when they made mistakes (which of course they did) because it was clear they were working hard to get the job done.
