Europe?s first Umpire Tutor Training Seminar held at Lord?s

The inaugural ICC European Umpire Tutor training seminar was held at the MCC Indoor School on the weekend of 16-18 January.

Designed to prepare ICC Member Countries to become more self-sufficient in their umpire education programmes, the seminar also gave ICC Europe Tutors the opportunity to assess the experience and skill-level of each of the 20 tutors who attended the course.

Graham Cooper, ICC Regional Umpires Consultant - Europe, said: "If we can reach the stage where umpire education is carried out by the Member country's own tutors in their native language, then we will have taken a giant step forward in our education programme."

The seminar, co-ordinated by Cooper, was designed with maximum interaction in mind: in order to create a varied programme of presentations each tutor was asked to present a Law in a specified format. This led to some innovative presentations involving flipcharts, written scenarios, practical demonstrations using playing equipment, as well as the customary powerpoint displays.

During each presentation, a peer review of each tutor's performance was also conducted by the rest of the group. This feedback exercise, although daunting initially, proved very useful in stimulating ideas for future tutoring sessions and presentations. Depending on the result of each assessment, the tutor may then become qualified to run an ECB Association of Cricket Officials Level 1 Course independently, or assist an ICC Europe Tutor at delivering such a course.

Despite being a tiring and self-reflective weekend, the seminar met its objectives in every way: "If the intention was to get those of us who have been tutoring for a while to rethink what we're doing, then for me it was an unqualified success," said one satisfied tutor.

Reflecting on whether this could be the first of many seminars of this nature, Cooper commented: "It was great to see such enthusiasm from everyone and we feel that this is a very positive start in achieving our objectives.

"Like umpiring, tutoring takes time and effort to master. Becoming a good tutor is not achieved overnight but, with a start like this, we are confident that we are on the right road."

Seminar attendees:

Niels Bagh - Denmark

Paul Baldwin ? Germany

David Caldwell - Ireland

Richard Eames ? Belgium

John Edmonds - Jersey

Vic Hadcroft - Scotland

Stephen Harrison - France

Bjarne K Jensen ? Denmark

Sanjeev Kad - Finland

Bob Lomax ? Gibraltar

Trevor Magee - Ireland

Willem Molenaar ? Netherlands

John Mountford - Guernsey

David Rhodes - France

Jari Schabel ? Finland

Sandy Scotland ? Scotland

Jiteshwar Singh - Switzerland

Keith Smith ? Ireland

Peter Thew ? Ireland

Alan Tuffery - Ireland

Mentors

Ken Amos

Keith Healey

Ray Holyer