To put it mildly, Yuya Kiuchi loves the game of soccer. Among his many titles, Kiuchi is the State Director of Referee Development in the State of Michigan, an independent contractor with U.S. Soccer, and a referee assessor for multiple professional soccer leagues. Now, Kiuchi is adding the title of Director of the Referee Academy at the 2024 Target USA Cup.
“A big part of this is not just referee development but of mentor development”, says Kiuchi. “We’re trying to develop referee mentors in Minnesota.”
The Referee Academy is a combination training event for referees and referee mentors, those who evaluate and coach referees. There are approximately 10 referees involved and 17 referee mentors with the participants coming from Minnesota, Michigan, California and South Dakota.
Says Yuya, “One of the major challenges is that we don’t have enough referees and that many referees quit. But if you are able to create an environment where you have somebody to rely on when something goes wrong, I’m going to have somebody I can ask. And they’re not going to be judgmental, they’re not going to be ‘why did you do that?’ But, if they can be ‘Let’s work together’ we can do better next game and that’s something we have been focusing on here.”
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The schedule for the participating referees is rigorous. Referees work games during the first two time slots of the day each day of
the tournament. They are assigned to the referee position and the assistant referee position to gain game experience in both roles.
Mentors join in on-field observations. Following the games the referees and mentors break for lunch then reassemble at 1 pm for a 90-minute classroom session. The academy referees work on fields with video coverage, so they are able to review their games during the classroom session.
“We don’t deal with spectators, we don’t deal with teams, we don’t deal with coaches and players, there are other people who specialize in that”, says Yuya. “We leave spectators and teams to them and we focus on the referees. We look at what went wrong. Did you make mistakes? Did you have a tough game last week that’s still affecting you? What happened and how can we help them fix it so they don’t make the same mistake again but more importantly, just to be there.”
The role of the mentors in the classroom session is to review the video and offer support and advice for improvement to the referees. Essentially, this is the equivalent of the “on-field” experience for the referees. In turn, the academy staff offer support and advice to the mentors regarding their presentations to the referees.
“If you work with twenty referees they may get better, and they may share their knowledge and experience with a couple of others”, says Kiuchi. “But, if you are able to touch half that number with ten mentors those numbers will go out and see five, ten, twenty referees every weekend. So we are able to disseminate information, good practices, things to work on, much more efficiently and by doing that we are able to also make sure that referees not just get better as officials but also stay in the game.”
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Overseeing all of this is a US Soccer National Referee Coach and a staff of three US Soccer Referee Coaches. This group evaluates
the referees AND the referee mentors. It is a unique feature of this academy to focus on the development of referees AND mentors vs. tournament academies that typically only focus on referees.
Says Kiuchi, “You can be working state cup games then come here and have a really safe environment to get developed with very competitive games that are very different from what they may experience in Michigan or Minnesota, usually. So, that experience is huge and then mentors come and you get to see completely new teams, completely new referees from not just the U.S. but from abroad, all over the place and assessors and referees and coaches from all over the world. So, that is a huge value.”
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