A young Cumbrian teenager steps into the spotlight tomorrow as he officiates for the first time in an open age rugby union game.
Archie Harding, who started his playing career with the Penrith club, has been refereeing for two years now will take charge of the Counties 1 Cumbria game at Bower Park between Aspatria 2nds and Egremont.
He was taken under the wing of the Cumbria Referees Society after getting involved in a full RFU refereeing course and has impressed since then.
Penrith rugby club then set up a junior referee group and asked the society to support them.
Nathaniel Mitton, who is a member at Carlisler, where he coached junior rugby had attended the same RFU course and his dad had contacted the society for support.
Alasdair Boyle, the junior referees development officer with the society, said: “Archie only turned 17 last month and has shown great maturity in the way he has developed as a referee.
“This is the next step for him and I will be there at Aspatria, while our senior advisor Norman Laycock, who covers games up to Level Four will be watching Archie for the first time and I will be very interested to hear what he thinks.
“Previously Archie has refereed age group games at his club Penrith and has also been in charge of games between visiting Schools to Winters Park. It’s likely that he will referee an Under-18s Girls County game later this month on the 27th between Cumbria and Yorkshire.
“We were aware that lots of people do the training but don’t become part of the society. They may simply go on to officiate at the younger age level in their clubs or schools but, with no universities on our patch, we have no student refs joining us and needed to recruit and help develop young match officials.”
Aged from 15 to 18, some of the youngsters on courses were still playing, while others, like Nathaniel, had stopped but still wanted to be involved in the game.
Alasdair added: “Their enthusiasm is great. Now we have a system in place at Penrith, as well as some young officials trained at Kendal and Carlisle. We’ve also been supported by the coaches at Cockermouth who have arranged extra midweek games with Penrith specifically to support young match officials’ development.
“The hope is to take it across the county. We are sending assessors to watch the young match officials mic’d up, which is helping their development and they are putting in some fantastic performances.”
Apart from Penrith juniors practise games, where the young officials covered 20-minute sessions, the Newcastle Falcons Academy asked for age appropriate officials for some of their development events.
Originally it was anticipated they would run touch but, with the Academy players being aged 15, it was decided to put youngsters in the middle for the 15-minute games.
This group of young referees are enjoying the experience and, says Alasdair, even if they move away to university, they can be directed to the Referee Society there.
“We’ve already contacted the Referee Society in Leeds where one young official John Sedgewick is studying, and we’ll be delighted to find him fixtures when he’s back home. And it was hugely encouraging to see a group presented with their county shirts recently.”
The Cumbria Rugby Union Referees Society shirt, sponsored by Firpress, were presented to Finn Smith and Joshua Davies at Penrith by professional referee Ben Blain, who is also Cumbria Society training officer, and Michael Patz the RFU match official development manager.
At Wigton they were presented to Nathaniel and Archie Harding by Alasdair and Struan Hutchison an RFU rugby coach developer.
Archie takes that important next step at Bower Park tomorrow with the best wishes – and confidence – of the Cumbria Referees Society behind him.
