Officiating in Pan American takes a gigantic step forward!

On August 24, 2020, the Pan American Squash Federation (FPS), led by President Francisco Paradisi, together with  Squash Canada’s Executive Director Dan Wolfenden, signed a Memorandum of Mutual Understanding (MoU) in which Squash Canada granted the FPS the rights to use all the materials in Canada’s state of the art Officiating Program for the construction of a multilanguage e-learning platform. The Canadian Officiating Program is considered one of the best in the world, and includes a series of courses that will make up the FPS Officiating Program for both referees and appraisers on platforms in Spanish, English and Portuguese. This NEW program will be called the Pan-American Squash Officiating (PSO) , with the objective of being fast and reliable and giving easy access to anyone interested in learning the rules of squash, as well as for all those who want to be referees of our loved sport.

The NEW PSO website www.psofficiating.com  will launch its first courses in the beginning of 2021. The FPS Refereeing Program site will include a database for referees and appraisers, allowing them to upload their logs of refereed and appraised matches, including a news section and a calendar that will maintain all events at the Pan American level.

With regards to the refereeing “course”, it will follow the levels and criteria recently established by the highest authority in refereeing in our sport, the World Squash Officiating (WSO). Therefore, anyone who decides to pursue a career in officiating worldwide will not face any issues when it comes time to make the leap.

The FPS Refereeing Committee is honored and extremely grateful to share in Squash Canada’s vision for the future of squash. We are also grateful to the FPS Executive Committee for their support in enabling us to make this gigantic step forward for officiating in Pan America. “We are extremely fortunate for the generosity and collaboration of Squash Canada in assigning their content and usage rights to us.” President Francisco Paradisi expressed.

On behalf of the entire Pan American Squash Federation (FPS), our most sincere and respectful thank you to Squash Canada and the entire Canadian Squash community.