I reffed Milwaukee - my first NAC in years, although I reffed at Nationals this last summer. It clarified a couple things in my head, and was overall a good experience.

On the nuts and bolts front, there are a couple calls that I was not as good at and now see pretty well, particularly "attack stops, attack arrives." I'm still not quite sure how exactly to physically phrase that when I say it to the fencers, since there's no signal for "stops." I can either say that the attack is "no" or that it turns into a preparation, I suppose. I'll need to pay attention to a few other people as they make that call and see what they do.

There were a couple other distinct touches that I didn't quite have in my head before and do now. I remember vividly a moment of attack/counterattack where I was clearly able to see all the pieces of what the counterattacker was doing that made his action a counterattack. I've never before had a moment like that, where I could specifically tell that I was in the process of chunking together disparate pieces of information to create one group of knowledge. I probably won't ever have that moment again for that touch - I'll simply see it as a counterattack and that will be that.

Moments like that are one of the things that I most enjoy about reffing. It gives me a sense of how my brain works and what the limits of my brain are. I'm aware of micro-breaks in my attention, which are growing smaller and smaller. When I got back into reffing last year I would follow the first few actions of the phrase, and then simply stop taking in information. My eyes would be open, but there were gaps in what I remembered of the action, a sense of "wait, how'd the fencers get so far apart, they were just doing crazy infighting." I suppose it's similar to inattention blindness, where the brain, focusing on something else, stops interpreting information from the eyes. Here, my eyes and brain are focused on the same thing, but too much information comes in and my eyes just shut off. I still have moments of it, but they're much rarer. I guess that that's where chunking comes in. When I don't need to do as much work to interpret the action, when I can simply chalk up the moment as "attack/counterattck," then I can move on to the next moment in time along with the fencers. It's pretty common for refs to ask themselves why on earth they put up with the bad pay and yelling and such. For me, a large part of it is this chance to see how my brain works and feel that I'm pushing at and redefining the limits of my own processing power.

I got to use the video replay system, which was a very interesting experience. I think that it allows everybody to relax a bit more and focus on their job. The fencer can just think about fencing their opponent, the coach can just think about analyzing the bout and coaching their student, and the ref can be sure that they're making the best call possible. I did find that the monitor on the floor is a focal distance that I never use and that I had a very difficult time interpreting the information from there. I can probably practice this, though - put my computer on the ground and get myself in the habit of seeing that information.