Tom Beckvermit on keeping elite referees in peak condition

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The soccer referee patrols more than an acre and a half of the field for 90-plus minutes. The six to seven miles of a ref’s running include plenty of sprinting to keep up with the actions of world-class athletes amid the decision-making and disciplining.

Tom Beckvermit is Director of Sports Performance for PRO (Professional Referee Organization), which provides officials for MLS, NWSL, USL Super League, USL Championship, USL League One and MLS Next Pro).

Beckvermit, who joined PRO in 2018, had served as strength and conditioning coach at UNC Charlotte and the University of North Carolina. While growing up in Upstate New York, he played soccer, ran track and was his Highland High School football team’s kicker. He played college soccer at the University of Buffalo when it still competed in NCAA Division I.

SOCCER AMERICA: Soccer was your main sport growing up. How’d you end up being the football kicker?

TOM BECKVERMIT: The older players ahead of me started kind of a tradition — whoever took the goal kicks would also be the football team’s kicker. It became my turn and I ended up having a lot of fun with it.

SA: What was your longest field goal?

TOM BECKVERMIT: Like 43 yards. In overtime of one of our first games. It was easy for me. Just swing your foot. The kickoffs were fun too. In high school, the kickoff line was not that far from the end zone. So you could bang it into the end zone or you could have fun with it — put it up in the air, or coach would say it’s time for a squib kick and you’d do something crazy. It was just a fun time.

SA: And as a soccer player the fitness training at football practice was probably easy …

TOM BECKVERMIT: I practiced a minimal amount, but there would always be running at the end. And yeah, I would just smash everybody. Everyone’s dying and I’m just laughing. 

SA: And you ran track?

TOM BECKVERMIT: I was playing travel soccer at a decently high level. I would qualify for states in track in my events. Then when it would be time to go to states, I’d be like, sorry guys, I have soccer practice. 

SA: At the University of Buffalo you studied physical therapy …

TOM BECKVERMIT: I was kind of on the PT track at Buffalo. Most of the people that I studied with ended up being physical therapists, but I took the strength conditioning coach route. The road less traveled from that program.

SA: What inspired that?

TOM BECKVERMIT: I tore my ACL when I was an incoming freshman. Probably from kicking too many footballs. 

My physical therapists were great and they really helped me out. But the person who really got me back to playing to the point where I was stronger, faster and better than before I tore my ACL was my strength and conditioning coach. 

SA: How did you end up at PRO?

TOM BECKVERMIT: I was coaching soccer and other athletes, but mainly soccer at the college level as a strength and conditioning coach. The sports psychologist at one of the teams that I was coaching with was working with PRO. He had identified that they had a job opening that I might be interested in. 

It seemed like a project that I could make some impact with — an opportunity to impact the game in a positive way. I jumped into it, liked it, and just kept going. It’s pretty cool. A great place to be a strength and conditioning coach. 

SA: Did you have any refereeing experience? 

TOM BECKVERMIT: No. Nothing besides maybe waving a flag at one of my father’s men’s league games. I never blew a whistle. But I felt I could as a former player put myself in the referees’ shoes.  

I joked that I’m one of the only people in the organization who doesn’t have referee goggles, but I’m getting better at looking at the game from that perspective.

SA: High level referees I’ve interviewed often say the toughest part is maintaining fitness and the demands of training on one’s own …

TOM BECKVERMIT: The demands are high and they’re only getting higher. Especially in the United States, where teams with different tactics are getting more and more physical. Players are getting faster and faster and the play seems to be getting faster and faster and faster. It’s really important that referees stay in shape. 

SA: I’ve seen stats that referees cover about six to seven miles per game.

TOM BECKVERMIT: Yes, the distance is usually somewhere between 9.5 and 11 [kilometers] per 90-minute match usually. That’s usually on par with most of the players on the field.

SA: Estimates are that the referee’s sprinting in a game can add up to one mile (1,000 to 1,700 meters) …

TOM BECKVERMIT: Higher speed intensities depend on who is measuring and how, so the question is harder to answer depending on the thresholds used to determine the definition of what speed counts as a run or a sprint. But there is definitely a fair amount of high intensity running per match.

The closer you can stay to the play and position yourself as the ball moves for the best angles, the more often you’re going to be correct with your decision. The better your physical ability is, the better your ability to be in those best positions.

SA: There’s also a certain amount of agility required, right, to cover so much ground while maintaining the optimal views?

TOM BECKVERMIT: Lots of different movements. There’s a fair amount of lateral movement. The goal is when the ball progresses, you get yourself near the penalty area, but you’re constantly changing your angles.

SA: To monitor the officials’ fitness and their training they have an app on their watches that sends you information?

TOM BECKVERMIT: The Eclipse Yourself app verifies the workload that we’ve been prescribing. It helps measure all the workload of their matches and their running and their workouts and translates that into something meaningful to see if what they’re doing is pushing them to adapt in a positive manner.

It’s basically a load monitoring tool for running, lifting, and anything you could be doing physically. It also has a component where it monitors recovery and sleep.

SA: Would you look at the data, then call the ref and say, “Mike, it looks like last week you didn’t do your training!”?

TOM BECKVERMIT: It verifies that they’re doing what we’ve asked them to do. It’s their full-time job. We give them workouts and they do them.

But it also verifies whether we’ve given them too much or too little. Given the situation, maybe we are trying to push them aerobically or we’re trying to push their high-intensity running. Whatever they’re trying to add to at the moment that can tell us if we’re doing enough or not enough. 

SA: Does it also include a health component, like red flags maybe?

TOM BECKVERMIT: There’s a way for them to communicate to us an injury or an illness. It basically has a dashboard where if someone’s at risk of injuring themselves because they’re doing too much, it’ll be very obvious to us. At a glance, we can see if that person is overdoing it. And in the same way, if you’re not doing enough, you’re also putting yourself at injury risk. 

Besides the technology, if you can’t meet the demands of the match it will be very obvious.

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SA: When I hear about coaches monitoring players’ sleep, I wonder if  that can be counter productive — making them nervous about falling asleep knowing they’re kind of being spied on …

TOM BECKVERMIT: You’re worried about getting pulled because you had a bad night’s sleep because you already had the butterflies or something like that? It’s more of looking at trends over time.

A one-off bad night’s sleep — you can recover from that pretty easily. We have a recovery score with HRV (Heart Rate Variability) that verifies if you’re in a good state or a bad state. Sometimes it just pops up that you had a really bad night of sleep or it’s outside of your typical. Maybe that’s a communication point for me to reach out to one of our officials and say, “Hey, everything all right? Can you do the workout today based on what I’m seeing on your recovery score and your sleep score? Or do I need to make a modification today so that I’m not tanking you even further?”

Obviously if you’ve gotten poor sleep for an entire week, then it becomes a conversation point about what you’re doing to set yourself up to be in the best situation to referee. 

SA: Are there common injuries for referees?

TOM BECKVERMIT: There’s not as much high intensity change of direction as there is for players, so with referees you don’t really see ACLs or catastrophic ankle injuries.

What we tend to see … you’ll have some hamstrings, some posterior chain stuff. But the main thing that we battle is lower leg and foot stuff.

SA: Why is that?

TOM BECKVERMIT: There’s five or six factors that go into that, but for officials I have a couple theories: One is footwear. The other is training surface.

Players are in their cleats every single day on grass. They’re adapted to that footwear and they’re adapted to the surface. Officials don’t have a soccer academy facility to train at. They’re running on the road, on a treadmill or in a park. Running on very hard ground, or on a track. 

If you’re used to and adapted to that type of surface, going to a grass field and putting on a different shoe can make you really sore or cause an injury because it’s putting a different load through your lower leg. 

Footwear and training surface are things that we’ve been trying to drive home for the last few years.

SA: FIFA used to have a mandatory retirement age of 45, which it lifted in 2014 …

TOM BECKVERMIT: As long as you can pass the FIFA-mandated referee fitness test and you’ve been performing well in games, you’re good to go. I think 52 is about the oldest that I’ve worked with. 

SA: What part of the test gets the most challenging with age?

TOM BECKVERMIT: The repeated sprint ability portion is the portion of the test that usually an older official might struggle with — to make the sprint times. 

SA: What do refs do when they have injury issues?

TOM BECKVERMIT: We have a medical staff. They have to report injuries to us. They report soreness that’s outside of the normal soreness. We get that information when they come to camp. They can utilize our athletic training staff to get the treatment that they need. Or we can set them up in their own market with whatever therapy they need.

SA: Are you also involved in how frequently officials are assigned games?

TOM BECKVERMIT: I’ll work with the assigning team, and we make sure that everyone has the appropriate recovery time. That we’re not over-assigning matches for someone, and also that we’re not keeping someone out so long that we’re jeopardizing their high fitness level.

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