FI­FA Ref­er­ee De­vel­op­ment Of­fi­cer Pe­ter Pren­der­gast has ex­tend­ed a vote of con­fi­dence to the elite group of 32 ref­er­ees who com­plet­ed the FI­FA Ref­er­ees As­sis­tance Pro­gramme (RAP) work­shop at the Ato Boldon Sta­di­um on Thurs­day. Pren­der­gast along with T&T's Ramesh Ramd­han com­plet­ed some 26 cours­es through­out the Con­ca­caf this year with T&T be­ing the fi­nal stop. Both men are pre­vi­ous FI­FA World Cup ref­er­ees and have been ful­fill­ing the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of train­ing of­fi­cials and up­dat­ing them on the game's laws and of­fi­ci­at­ing. The RAP course was de­vel­oped by FI­FA with an aim to­wards pro­fes­sion­al­is­ing ref­er­ee ad­min­is­tra­tion and fo­cus­ing on the de­vel­op­ment of Elite Ref­er­ees in the World with uni­fied stan­dards and train­ing. "It was fan­tas­tic work­ing with these ref­er­ees. When I was told that I should be ex­pect­ing a lot of new re­cruits, the per­for­mances in the class­room and in the prac­ti­cal ses­sions on the field made it dif­fi­cult to tell that these were new re­cruits," Pren­der­gast said. "There's a good blend of ex­pe­ri­ence and the ones cur­rent­ly in the sys­tem gives you very good prospects to serve foot­ball in Trinidad and To­ba­go," the 48-year-old 2002 World Cup Ref­er­ee added. "In­for­ma­tion is pow­er and you need to share the pow­er all around. I want to make an ap­peal to the ref­er­ees who are sit­ting on the fence to get off the fence and come back on to the field. This is one na­tion and you need to put the em­pha­sis on the na­tion and not on per­son­al­i­ties." he added.

If that hap­pens I'm pret­ty sure the ref­er­ee­ing will get back to a lev­el where it should be in the na­tion and out there in com­par­i­son with the rest of the re­gion," Ramd­han stat­ed that the progress of these lo­cal ref­er­ees will be mon­i­tored on an on­go­ing process dur­ing the lo­cal Leagues and train­ing ex­er­cis­es will al­so spread over the year. A course for ref­er­ee as­ses­sors al­so start­ed on Fri­day. "I see an en­thu­si­asm and dri­ve from this group to be the best that they can be and that augers well. The sea­son here is still on­go­ing and we will con­tin­ue this de­vel­op­ment at the lo­cal lev­el. We will al­so work with the lo­cal in­struc­tors to bet­ter be able to dis­sem­i­nate the in­for­ma­tion on a reg­u­lar ba­sis," Ramd­han said. The pro­gram of works we have put in place will con­tin­ue with the train­ing of the in­struc­tors. The im­por­tant thing is to have on­go­ing train­ing and this will con­tin­ue through­out the sea­son. We will have an in­creased num­ber of as­ses­sors so that there will be present at more match­es and ref­er­ees will be marked ac­cord­ing­ly based on their per­for­mances at the match­es. Ch­agua­nas May­or Or­lan­do Nages­sar was a guest at Thurs­day's clos­ing cer­e­mo­ny and urged the lo­cal ref­er­ees to grab the present op­por­tu­ni­ty be­ing af­ford­ed to them, adding that he was keen to see lo­cal foot­ball rise again and that in­clud­ed the per­for­mances of the of­fi­cials and their sub­se­quent rise to the FI­FA pan­el which would see them car­ry the whis­tle and flag in in­ter­na­tion­al match­es out­side of T&T.

He al­so of­fered use of the Ch­agua­nas Bor­ough cor­po­ra­tion au­di­to­ri­um and fa­cil­i­ty to the TTFF for fu­ture en­gage­ments. His words were well re­ceived by oth­er TTFF of­fi­cials in­clud­ing Ref­er­ees Com­mit­tee chair­man Kr­ish­na Kuars­ingh and fit­ness in­struc­tor Merere Gon­za­les as well as Cen­tral FA Pres­i­dent Bri­an Layne. TTFF Act­ing Pres­i­dent Lennox Wat­son was among those pre­sent­ing spe­cial to­kens to some of the recog­nised par­tic­i­pants as well as their cer­tifi­cates. He too urged them to strive for bet­ter.

"The time spent here by the ref­er­ees dur­ing this course would be a def­i­nite plus in terms of their de­vel­op­ment. Now is the time for these ref­er­ees to con­cen­trate more on what is hap­pen­ing out­side of the field and for­get what hap­pens on the side­lines. "I am pret­ty sure they would have been well trained and equipped to car­ry out their du­ties. I know that fol­low­ing this course, there will be a lot of oth­er peo­ple com­ing on board," Wat­son said.