DE
Pod Setup
⤴ Collapse pods
As the draw shrinks, merge two pods into one. Choose which pistes and referees the merged pod keeps — the rest are released and become free to assign anywhere else.
Flags ⚑ Tournament-wide
Flag Setup
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Every piste covered.
Every referee ready.

RefManager gives fencing organizations one place to roster, hire, schedule and evaluate their referees, and to track their fees and expenses — from season planning to the last day of the tournament. With video at the piste: replay the last action, a clip on every call you tag, and the hard ones talked through by senior referees.

See what’s inside
Conflict check passed
No double-bookings · no fencing overlaps
42 / 42 referees hired
Last response 12 min ago
Built for provincial, national and regional tournaments Automatic conflict checks Bilingual · English & Français Multi-organization Video review in Chrome or Edge

Everything in one place

From season plan to tournament day

Rostering, hiring, scheduling, day-of operations, development, and finance — the whole referee lifecycle, without the spreadsheet sprawl.

Referee roster & 360° profiles

Ratings per weapon, exam history, assignment activity and notes — a living directory of your cadre, not a spreadsheet you dread opening.

Planning that does the math

Enter events and fencer counts, paste the schedule as you received it, or import an FIE XML file; RefManager computes pool sizes, piste counts and referee needs from FIE- and CFF-derived timings — per weapon, per phase.

Hiring & availability

Referees answer from the email or the app — the whole tournament or by half-day. In the same reply they select the events they’re fencing and the half-days they’re coaching, and the schedule is built around them: auto-assign keeps them off any event they’re fencing, anything overlapping it, and the half-days they’re coaching. You hire in one click. Unanswered invitations get reminders on their own, the hire email carries the particulars, and the referees you didn’t need are released politely.

Day-of operations

A live piste board with pods, flags and conflict detection keeps the floor moving — a swap is only offered when both referees come out clash-free. The DT desk shows the floor as a board, a table or a timeline, and every black card lands in one register.

Evaluations & development

Log calls pisteside from a phone, weight accuracy by difficulty, organize certification exams — sittings, candidates and grading — and grow candidates into rated referees, with a clip of the action attached to each call.

Finance without friction

Referees submit expenses with receipts, checked against your per-diem caps; the host club or the federation approves; fees are calculated from your rates; approved claims export to Plooto for payment, and every referee can see their own earnings.

Video

See the call, not just the grade

An evaluation that says “wrong” teaches nothing. RefManager records the bout while the evaluator logs, cuts a clip for every call they tag, and — once your organization turns sharing on — puts that clip in front of the referee next to the grade, so development becomes coaching instead of a verdict.

A clip per call — record from a phone, a tablet or a camera on a laptop; every tagged call comes back as its own short clip, already cut. Nobody scrubs through an hour of footage.
Frame-accurate phrase marks — attack, parry, riposte, remise, corps à corps and more, marked frame by frame at the clip’s real frame rate — 60 fps by default, 120 where the camera can. Right of way is about order and timing, so the gap between marks reads in frames and milliseconds, honest about ± one frame.
Two reads, side by side — your read and another referee’s show as separate lanes on the same timeline, with the first point where they disagree marked. That difference is the lesson.
Shared on purpose, not by default — clips stay on the evaluator’s device unless your organization turns sharing on and someone chooses to share one; on the phone or tablet that recorded it, a clip is trimmed to the useful seconds first, and device copies age out on a schedule. Annotation never touches a rating.

Replay

Look again, without leaving the piste

A camera and the scoring box, at the piste. The box marks the moment, RefManager cuts the clip, and the last action is one tap away. It runs in Chrome or Edge on a laptop, reading the box through the Passivity Timer bridge (tested on the Favero FA-05), with a built-in simulator to learn on.

The box does the tagging — each touch and each referee halt is cut automatically and labelled with the lights, score, clock, period and cards as the box showed them — and when time runs out in foil or épée, an End-of-period clip with ten seconds of lead-in. The operator sets the weapon and, if they like, the fencers’ names.
One tap to the last action — the clip is cut a few seconds after the action — six seconds before it and four after, by default — so a second look costs the piste seconds, not minutes.
Classified for the weapon on the piste — the same lights mean different things in each weapon, and each call is labelled for what it is: an épée double scores for both fencers, a foil or sabre double is a right-of-way call, a white light is off-target in foil, and sabre has no off-target and no passivity. The weapon comes from the selector on the Live tab, switchable mid-session — or from the box itself on supported boxes.
The replay shows what the box showed — lights, score and clock are drawn over the picture as they were at each moment, and the action loops around the touch at a length you choose.
Every bout, kept on the device — Review shows the bout in progress and Bouts lists the earlier ones with their clips. Clips stay on the device that recorded them; the ones worth discussing go to Call Review with the box’s lights, score and clock attached.

Call Review

Send the hard one to the seniors

Some calls are worth more than a grade — they are worth a conversation. Post the clip to teach with, or as a question, and senior referees and evaluators answer where your whole cadre can read it.

A teaching clip, or a question — a clip from the evaluation logger or from the box at the piste posts to the board straight away, or is flagged to the Inbox and written up later. Teach with it, or ask how others would call it. The evaluation itself is never touched.
Guidance, never a verdict — no voting, no tally, no official ruling. Senior referees and evaluators answer in the open, a comment can point at a moment in the clip, one coaching note is pinned as the key takeaway, and the poster is told when a senior take lands.
The referee is anonymous by default — the board sees the clip, the box’s lights and score, the weapon and the difficulty — not who refereed it, and not the fencers unless the poster adds them. A question nobody wants to raise about themselves is exactly the one worth asking.
Kept for as long as you want it — the video stays with the post unless your organization sets it to be deleted after a year or after 90 days; the takeaway and the discussion are kept either way. By default any referee can save a copy to their own device.
Practice, and collections — turn posted clips into practice: make your call, lock it in, then see the takeaway. Group the clips worth returning to into collections.

Cadre insights

Know the health of your cadre

Cadre Insights reads the roster and season history you already keep in RefManager and turns it into a clear picture of coverage, staffing speed, responsiveness, and retention.

Demand-adjusted weapon coverage — spot under-covered weapons against peak piste demand
Fill rates and median time-to-fill, with a weapon-by-weekday heatmap of staffing gaps — and every figure opens to the referees behind it
Invitation responsiveness — accept, decline, and no-response rates across the cadre
Depth, turnover, and retention — who's active, who's lapsed, and where the roster is thin

How it works

Three steps to a calmer tournament

01

Plan

Create the tournament, paste the schedule or import an FIE XML file, and let the rules engine size pools, pistes and referee needs automatically.

02

Staff

Send invitations, collect availability, and hire with one click — reminders go out on their own, and the hiring board shows exactly who’s confirmed and where the gaps are.

03

Run

Work the live piste board and the DT desk on the day, log evaluations pisteside with the clip attached, and approve expenses as they come in.

Ready for a calmer tournament?

Already part of a federation on RefManager? Sign in below. Curious what it could do for your organization? Take a look at what’s inside.

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