Somerset Hockey Umpire S Association Disbanded Possibly 20/25 Years Ago and Their Members

UMPIRING

We need to go back in history a while. About the turn of the century “Hockey” decided to amalgamate sexes for many of its County associations and regional ones as well. Further back Umpires associations had separated men’s and women’s sections as well although some seemed to get taken under their county’s constitution when those big constitutional changes took place and indeed also lost this “separation” factor.

Somerset Hockey Umpire’s Association disbanded possibly 20/25 years ago and their members drifted into ASHUA (Avon and Somerset Hockey Association) which currently exists and appoints umpires to Men’s matches above a certain level in Somerset and Avon. Avon County Women’s Hockey Umpire’s Association exists obviously to appoint in the County of Avon. There is thus a huge void for lower level Somerset men and also Somerest Women. You can see there remains a men and women divide.

Somerset has constitutional boundary problems that I believe no other West County has (certain parts of Avon being Women and Youth whilst the same area for Men is Somerset) and whilst both of these umpire’s associations do cover areas in which we have clubs that are in the association they do not necessarily fit into “Somerset” properly.

Originally I believe it was thought ASHUA did fulfil the County as the umpiring section but ultimately they have divorced themselves from this idea (we have been lucky in that the Disciplinary Officer for Somerset has often been able to provide information from his roles in ASHUA to filter information and provide assistance with courses but this not necessarily his job). I was tasked with trying to set up something more “tangible” in Somerset and provide something which we could belong to and that would enable “umpires” to flourish. We did look at Devon’s model. To succeed here someone would have to be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort!

So currently we have decided to “piggy-back” onto ACWHUA where they will allow us become “associate members” (you have to live within Avon to be a full member). The Somerset associate members to form a sub committee and send “a member” to attend their full committee meetings. They have recently held their AGM and were happy for this to proceed. They are prepared to support us initially to put in places courses, coaching, mentoring, rules evenings, etc. but also want us to enable our own members to train up as well to undertake these roles. There is a cost of membership at £11.00 but this does provide insurance and other benefits. It will be open to all Level 1 umpires and candidates (probably on their records anyway) and the suggestion is we e mail all within Somerset with “the vision” and see what follows.

ASHUA have been spoken to and whilst the person spoken to said “this is only my view” they could not really see any advantage to them joining in currently and actually thought “pooling” players to do neutral games in Somerset on a Saturday should also be considered i.e your better umpires to miss a match every 3 to 4 weeks to umpire and not play. This maybe an idea we can also follow.

If the AGM is happy to support the ACWHUA way forward then I suggest that we proceed quickly to put this in place now. Please feel fee to ask questions which I will try to answer.

Phil Morrish 16.05.12