Auburn Women’s Football Camp: The Inside Story
By Kim Trimble
An overview of Auburn’s annual football camp for women from an attendee.
Recently, the third annual Auburn Women’s Football Camp took place at the Auburn Athletic Center in the new indoor practice facility. If you’re wondering what the heck a football camp for women entails, I’m here to tell you.
It’s a full day with the coaches and football staff, going through drills on both offense and defense, talks from the coaches, SEC officials, and head coach Gus Malzahn himself. If you’re a female football fan or know of one who loves the game, this camp is a lot of fun and really interesting to attend. They don’t “dumb it down” or act like the women attending don’t know anything about football, but you do get an inside look at many things about the sport you might
not otherwise know. As the daughter of a former college and pro player who loves the game, I was pleasantly surprised to learn a lot and have a great time with my friends in the process.
The day is split into several parts, starting with registration, with camp beginning soon after. Attendees focus on offense and defense in rotating morning and afternoon sessions, hearing from coordinators and assistant coaches from each side. We also get to meet and have our picture made with Coach Malzahn, and there is a Q&A session with him as well that is a lot of fun.
In between, there is a catered lunch and lots of opportunities for interaction with the coaches and Auburn football staff. There are practice drills with each position coach and assistants, and while that might sound intimidating, it’s actually a lot of fun and gives you a better insight into just how much work both players and coaches put into practice and game preparation. My friends and I had a great time learning that we were never meant to be kickers and that being a center is not as easy as it looks from the stands, and also that it is possible to throw the perfect spiral, at least once, anyway.
One of the highlights of the day is getting to hear from an SEC official about what exactly they have to do in order to prepare to officiate a game. The officials all have regular jobs in addition to their officiating duties, the one that spoke to us is a Coca-Cola executive during the week, and members of his crew consist of an FBI agent, bank president, and a doctor, among other things. Their officiating work just doesn’t begin on Saturday morning, it’s a seven-day a week effort.
Each official is expected to adhere to a strict grading scale set forth by the SEC officials office, the highest being 100 per game, with points deducted for missed calls and other infractions. For instance, a missed call is three points which makes the score 97, and anything below 95 is considered bad enough to pull the referee off of game rotation.
Their duties during the week after and leading up to a game include but are not limited to:
- Reviewing game film and provide feedback to other refs/main office
- Referee conference call
- Weekly rules quizzes
- previewing upcoming games
- Watching training films and other meetings
- Preparing a film report for submission on what they saw/did
With each game averaging around 180 plays, this is a lot of work! Not to mention knowing all of the rules (12 in total), the 47 signals used to communicate fouls, and being able to keep up with most everything on the field and off, including keeping an eye on the coaches and other things around the field. They also run between 9-11 miles per game, most of it backwards.
On game day, they have to have a 4 hour meeting prior to leaving for the game. This means if it’s an 11 a.m. game, they have to meet at 6 a.m.! They then arrive at the stadium 2 hours before kickoff, and three of them have to be on the field an hour before the game during warm-ups. At the 45 minute mark, all officials are on the field, then they have to test their equipment and make sure everything on the field is marked and working correctly. 20 minutes before
kickoff they remove the teams from the field, and return out on field with the captains with 5 minutes before kickoff. With 3 minutes to go, they have the captains back on their respective sidelines. Post-game, they have to start their week over again with phone calls, meetings and making their notes of what they just did, almost all of it having to be committed to memory because you can’t really take notes while you’re running backwards watching a 300 lb lineman chase down the ball. It’s a lot to do and looks way easier to most of us armchair officials who yell at them to “do your job!” on fall Saturdays.
Refs also aren’t allowed to have social media because of death threats they’ve received in the past (it happened more often than you’d think, according to the official), and they are limited in their movements on game weekend and always go somewhere in a group.
So the next time you see an SEC official, know that they actually DO go through a lot of training and hard work to get the job done right, even though when your team is on the end of a bad call, it sure doesn’t seem like it.