The blackboard and the beautiful game
Opunake High School principal Peter O’Leary recounts his move from player to referee to Christina Persico and how he feels right at home in his new community.
Peter O’Leary still chuckles at the memory of his first game in his
21-year football referee career. The new Opunake High School principal admits he was ‘‘never the greatest player’’.
‘‘My nickname was ‘Splinter’ because I spent more time on the bench than playing in the game.
‘‘I was at work and one of the referees was a supplier for the work I was doing at the time. We were just having a chat and he said ‘you don’t get much game time’ and I said ‘no, it’s frustrating’. He said, ‘well, you ever thought of taking up refereeing?’’’
O’Leary, who was living in the Waikato at the time, went along to one of the referee’s meetings, and when his team was knocked out of the playoffs, he was given a shot.
‘‘All the old heads were in one team – Peter Cooper and all these guys that had played at top level but were late forties, early fifties and they just went out there to enjoy themselves.
‘‘I remember this vividly because I was standing next to Peter Cooper, and I was saying, ‘that guy looks offside’, and he was standing next to me and goes, ‘yeah he does eh’. I said ‘yeah – oh!’’’
O’Leary quickly blew his whistle. ‘‘It was foreign, because I’d always played and I’d been a player, and going, oh hang on, all of a sudden you’ve got to referee, so you’re now making the decisions.’’
It took him from local league to national league in 1999 and to Fifa level in 2003.
‘‘You get a buzz from that interaction, from being there, from being, to quote a colleague, ‘the best seat in the game’. It is; you are right there and you see amazing shots go in and you can see what’s going to happen before it happens.’’
O’Leary is most famous, or infamous, for a disallowed goal at the
2014 World Cup, where he ruled the Bosnia and Herzegovina striker offside. It saw them exit the tournament, and the backlash continued for weeks to the extent that he received death threats.
‘‘With some people you’re always unpopular. With two teams you’re always going to be unpopular to one team. That’s a fact of the game.’’
He retired from refereeing in 2015, after his 64th A-League game, between the Phoenix and the Central Coast Mariners at Westpac Stadium. He adjudicated the league’s first game a decade earlier.
But he’s never been able to completely leave behind the beautiful game.
‘‘This will be the first year that I haven’t taken a school team. Every year I’ve been teaching, since 2000, I’ve always had a school team. It’s always been, ‘Oh Peter can you come and referee this game?’’’
It was not always an easy juggle. He is grateful for the years of support from school staff and boards, as he often had to jump on a plane first thing on a Friday morning, referee an A-League fixture in Australia that night, and come back the next day.
‘‘However, the internet meant he could still work with his students.
‘‘But you get used to it and your body gets used to it, and you get used to your routine.
‘‘The students and the staff and my mates kept me grounded.’’
O’Leary said he missed refereeing for about a year because of the absence of the workload, but attributes from refereeing crossed over into teaching, such as management and conflict resolution. He said a good teacher needed to be invested in their students.
‘‘The first school I was at in Auckland, I taught at Waitakere College and I’ll always remember a girl, Bianca Nicholson. At the time, I kept thinking, ‘why do you keep doing this?’
‘‘She used to put her hand up and say ‘I don’t understand’... ‘I don’t understand’. And after four or five years on, now all I can think of is how brave she was to say, ‘actually I don’t understand, can you explain it another way?’
‘‘It’s really brought home there are so many different ways of approaching a subject or approaching a task to explain...And it’s finding the key that fits that particular student.’’
He and his family – wife Rachelle and sons Adam, who is almost 11, and Ethan, 9 – love their new town.
‘‘It’s warm, it’s friendly, it’s inviting. I’ve said it a number of times, it feels like home.
‘‘Everyone’s so welcoming, so friendly – ‘what help do you need? What can I do for you?’
‘‘The school’s results here have been really really good the last three, four, five years, so they’ve stepped up each year.
‘‘That for me means the staff are invested in the students, and the students are invested in the school, and the community’s definitely invested in the school.’’
‘‘You get a buzz from that interaction, from being there, from being, to quote a colleague, ‘the best seat in the game’. It is; you are right there and you see amazing shots go in and you can see what’s going to happen before it happens.’’