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Use of “Smart watches and Apps”

O

oldman


Referees in England
A few weeks ago I was watching a BUCS game. Enjoyable for players and well refereed (in my opinion) by a Young man. My comment regards his use of a watch to record everything, time, scoring, recording penalties and cards. No paper back up. What happens if the watch stops, gets damaged or wet burning a game.
 
As CR has intimated, no method is fool proof so whatever floats your boat as far as I’m concerned.
I assume it was not a BUCS Super League match. At BSR level there will generally loads of people keeping an eye on things.
 
I use a smart watch but at 1/2 time I make a note ofr the first half score and important details in my notebook. The smartwatch has not let me down, yet.

If it is fully charged before the game it is unlikely to stop.
 
Kit is always a risk decision isn't it.
When I travel by car I take my bag, which contains all sorts of spare stuff
But if I cycle for 40 minutes I do take risks, do I really need three colours of shirt? Do I need my rain jacket? Do I need three watches and two whistles? If i wear trackie to cycle do i need to bring some trousers for after? Or should I just wear the trousers cycling and risk getting them oily
Etc etc. I just make some judgements
Same with watch v paper , what are the advantages, what are the risks ? Let the ref make their own decision
 
I use a smartwatch, and is my first choice, but run that in parallel with paper. Paper is useful as a record copy of the match (I still have all the score cards from every game I have officiated)

The watch is mostly used for on the fly game updates and, obvioulsly, time keeping. I can know the score or how long a card has left at just a glance. I still have another basic digital watch on my other wrist as a back up for the time.

As for waterproofness. Most smart watches are at least IPX6 rated so can stand a serious downpour with no real issue. Only problem is the response on the screen can be a little funky but nothing a little wipe on your jersey couldn't solve.

Apps do get dodgy updates and can crash so I always keep the traditional methods running as back ups. Never really had a problem other than a yellow card timer glitch which was resolved by an update pretty quickly and I noticed it at the time.
 
I use both, a combination of OCD and avoiding mistakes, and having something that works in all conditions - watches / apps with just touch screens may well be waterproof, but don’t respond well to touch in the cold and heavy rain, also most can’t easily show you the history to check you haven’t accidentally mis tapped or double tapped.

Paper cards allow you to do a running total check of your tally, you can easily take a photo if you want a digital record, but are vulnerable to the rain and terrible handwriting!

Take your pick as to which problems you need to solve!
 
oldman said:
A few weeks ago I was watching a BUCS game. Enjoyable for players and well refereed (in my opinion) by a Young man. My comment regards his use of a watch to record everything, time, scoring, recording penalties and cards. No paper back up. What happens if the watch stops, gets damaged or wet burning a game.
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As someone who uses the WTR watch app on my Apple Watch - and have done for nearly 3 seasons - it's at the point where it's stable enough to trust during a match. It is also far quicker and less fiddly than using paper.

Apple Watches are a waterproof watch, won't get damaged as it's designed for use in sport, and if it did break then I'd say it's of a similar emergency to losing a paper score card.

I've done 35ish games this season without a problem, and properly used it for around 180/90 games in total. In all those games - I had 2 games very early on (when I was using a paper back up) where it decided to freeze on me before kick off and restarting the apple watch fixed it.
 
My middle aged eyes aren't good enough to use a phone without my glasses on, let alone a smartwatch.

I use a timex ironman sports watch as my timer (a large one, where the display is big enough for me to read, with physical start and stop buttons to press) and then I keep score in a small notebook , using an HB pencil and writing quite big :-)
 
crossref said:
My middle aged eyes aren't good enough to use a phone without my glasses on, let alone a smartwatch.

I use a timex ironman sports watch as my timer (a large one, where the display is big enough for me to read, with physical start and stop buttons to press) and then I keep score in a small notebook , using an HB pencil and writing quite big :-)
Click to expand...
Not sure about the make of watch just a cheap digital timer and a cheap standard clock face from the market with big numbers and note book and pencil too! can't see without mu reading glasses for the apps either
 
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