We're excited to have recently welcomed NRLW and World Cup referee Rochelle Tamarua into the Queensland Rugby League officiating team as our officiating coordinator.
The new role was created on the back of recommendation from a review of officiating in Queensland in 2019 to assist community referees' associations around the state.
Part of her role is to assist the associations through regional referee assembly meetings, which will be held by monthly.
It will be an opportunity for associations to get together, share any concerns and also work together and share information about activities or things that they've undertaken that have been successful in either engaging, educating or retaining match officials.
Rochelle will also be assisting the associations with some governance around blue cards and accreditations through My Sideline.
She also comes from a development background as a referee development officer for the local league in Auckland, which means she will be heavily involved in targeted programs relating to our Pasifika community and women in league.
Rochelle, a current NRLW and representative experienced official, will this week be leading a team of 10 female officials from both our junior representative group and local associations in the South East region in a visit to Sydney as part of Women in League Round.
These officials have been selected to train with the NRL's elite officiating squad for a day to learn from some of the best in the business.
Those participating are Tori Wilkie, Izzy Davidson, Amelia Ac, Alyssa Donaldson (Gold Coast), Paris Bosse (Ipswich), Summa Pont, Lily Sumner, Madison Fields, Savannah Clulow (Brisbane).
In other officiating news, Activate! Queensland Country Week was a great one for officials in our high performance unit, who got right into the spirit of mixing with officials in the area during the round.
In Biloela, our two touch judges in the Hostplus Cup game assisted with two further local matches in reserve grade and under 19s to help with the load of local match officials.
They also did some coaching in-game with one of the young touchies out there.
In Miles, we had regional match officials from Central region earn the reward of a representative opportunity, stepping outside of their normal week to week, local league experience to officiate Queensland Outback versus NSW Outback matches.
A couple of our officials followed that up with another unique experience, heading to Darwin to help the referees in the local A grade competition, the third time the QRL has done so this year.
It's really good opportunity for those guys to experience rugby league in a different area and it's part of their development in terms of traveling, different preparation, different style of football and opportunities that don't generally present.
We also had officials involved in international matches during the statewide competitions bye, including the South Africa versus Philippines match at Tugun.
The break for the rest really marks the end of the 'grind' of the middle part of the season, which is always the hardest part.
You've been training for a long time, there's week in, week out football and then it sort of gets cold and it's a bit harder for everyone to deal, but we're on that home stretch now where our officials have got to really start owning their skills and getting ready for finals football.
There's still some important games to officiate in the next four to five weeks before finals that will determine the ladder, so we'll be sharpening our focus at training and start looking at different situations in games and train for those types of situations that may emerge.
