Waikato Premier referee Ben Woolerton returns to the club rugby scene this weekend after a stint refereeing at the SANIX World Rugby Youth Tournament in Fukuoka, Japan.

The SANIX World Rugby Youth Tournament is an annual tournament hosted at Global Arena in Munakata City, Fukuoka, Japan. The 2023 event was the first since 2019 that sees a return of international schools in attendance. A First XV event that hosts 12 teams from across the world, with six counties represented.

Woolerton was selected to attend by New Zealand Rugby’s High Performance Referee Manager Chris Pollock as New Zealand’s sole referee representative. He was joined alongside fellow international referees from Australia Rugby, USA Rugby & England Rugby all had young men attending refereeing at the event alongside Woolerton.

Across the eight-day event, Woolerton officiated in four fixtures, along with a couple of Assistant Referee duties thrown in to keep the legs ticking over. Those four matches were made up of two pool games, a semi-final, and the 5^th v 6^th play-off on finals day.

Woolerton is our third Waikato referee to attend the SANIX event, with Michael Winter & Grant Stuart attending previously. The trio all reflect on how great the event is as an experience that all referees would love to attend - going to a foreign country, experiencing all that has to offer as well as getting to referee high quality matches sure is a referee bucket list experience. The matches are of good First XV quality with the Japanese sides playing very structured rugby.

Woolerton reflected on his time there and shared how great the experience was for him. Taking full advantage of their off days, along with his fellow international referees they experienced the bullet train to Hiroshima and visited the A-Bomb dome and museum, went into Fukuoka City and experienced the Dazaifu Temple. The final experience was taking in the sights at the Softbank Hawkes baseball game with 40,000 fans in attendance at the indoor Paypay Dome. Woolerton said “I struggled with the chop sticks but after using them for every meal over 12 days, we certaintly got the hang of it.

The people in Japan are outstanding hosts and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and hope to go back to Japan again. The Japanese teams also surprised us with the standard of rugby they played, how clean the games were and how well disciplined the Japanese teams were even with the language barrier with us international referees.”

Arriving back in New Zealand Sunday afternoon, Woolerton is straight back into Premier club rugby this weekend when he referees University v Morrinsville Sports at the University Complex.

Article added: Tuesday 09 May 2023