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DENVER, CO – This is the first day of the FIL World Championships and I am one of a dozen or so officials selected to represent the United States at this event. It’s the largest international lacrosse event in history. A whopping 38 teams, including a host of newcomers (Turkey, Poland, Uganda, Costa Rica – me) are slated to participate.
Even though the selection process for this team happened about a year ago, there were butterflies this morning as I got in the car (that I bought from the best jeep dealership near me) in Bayonne and was driven so graciously to Newark Airport by my mother at 5 a.m.
Arriving here in Denver was anxiety relieving. All my bags arrived unfettered and my day-mares of my lax bag getting lost with all my equipment in it were tossed away like an old, dirty penalty flag.
Being the biggest tournament in history means the biggest officiating group in history as well. I have some great mentors out here. Guys that I have come to know well since I first tried out for International Officiating events prior to the U-19 World Games three years ago. Chris Clark, a stellar, if not underappreciated nationally, official chief among those mentors.
Chris was one of three Americans selected back in 2011 to represent the USA in Finland for the U-19 games. He was joined back then by Peter Buchanan, who as a point of reference officiated the NCAA national championship this season. So that tells you the level he’s at.
He’s one of the more humble guys you’ll ever meet, but for all intents and purposes he doesn’t need to be. He’s a massive dude. He’s probably 6-foot-5 and weighs 220 lbs and looks like he can still run around on the field with the D-1 kids. He played at Michigan State when they had a varsity team, and was there when the school cut the program. So, what do you do when your school cuts the program? You go to, ho hum, Syracuse, to play.
Chris has been a guiding light through the darkness of these international rules the last few years and has been a bigger help than he’ll ever know. He’s a top-notch ref and a top-notch person. His only problem (and he’d punch me in the face if he saw me writing this) is that he lives in Buffalo. Not that living in Buffalo is a problem on its face. But it’s a problem if you want to have a lot of good lacrosse games around you. If he lived in Jersey he’d be inundated with D-1 lax assignments and be one of the guys who is a mainstay at the end of the high school season.
We are all settling in here, which is definitely a good thing. We’re going to be here for 15 days, so having a sense of normalcy is a good thing. I went to the grocery store with some of the other US guys, got a workout in with Kevin Forrester (he’s a massive cop from Baltimore who you really wouldn’t want to mess with) so things are feeling at least a little bit like home.
We have our first meeting of the trip with all the officials tonight at 8 p.m. and then our rules test is tomorrow. That’s the thing that everyone is freaking out about, and rightly so. But more on that tomorrow.
It’s been a whirlwind of meeting people from different countries so far, and that’s been fun. But it’s kind of like when you meet a girlfriend’s family for the first time and everyone is introducing themselves. You smile knowing that you’re most likely not going to remember their name nor they yours.
I am going to try (try, I said) to write every day along with this video blog. They probably won’t all be as long as this one is, but I’ll do my best.
As Heath Leger said in The Dark Knight, “and here….we…..Go!!!
