Registering for a Course

Every First Time Referee Course in Oregon is listed in one place: the Oregon Soccer Referee Organization’s course page. That page is also where you register once you’ve picked one.

Courses are added to that list as they get scheduled, not all at once for the whole year. A course in your area might not be posted yet even if one will run next month — and popular dates can fill up quickly once they are posted.

There’s no separate schedule to reproduce here, because any list would be out of date within weeks. The course page is the current one.

Once you’ve found a course and clicked through to register, the steps from there — what you’ll be asked for, and the one warning about which email address to use — are covered in Signing up.

Once you’ve found a course on the listing, registering for it is a short process. Here’s the order it happens in.

You’re 13 or older on the day you register. US Soccer requires this and makes no exceptions, even if you’ll turn 13 before the course itself. Pick the specific session you want from the course listing and follow its registration link. Register using an email address you’re going to keep for years, not a school or temporary one — Certification Requirements explains why that choice matters later. Pay the course fee as part of registering.

That’s it — once you’ve done these, you’re registered. What the fee actually costs, and what else you’ll need to spend on before your first game, is covered in What it costs.

From here, the next thing to think about is what to do before the course itself starts, which is its own stage.

The First Time Referee Course costs $99. If you’re 18 or older, add a background check fee of roughly $25 — under 18, that fee doesn’t apply to you. That $99 covers both halves of the course: the online modules and the in-person field training. There’s no extra charge for the field training itself.

That’s the course. It is not the whole bill.

Uniform and gear are a separate, up-front cost, and they’re not included in course registration. You’ll need at minimum a whistle, a set of assistant referee flags, cards, a referee “book,” a watch with a stopwatch, and yellow and green jerseys — see Equipment and where to get it for the full list and where Oregon referees buy it.

The sources here don’t give a current price for a starter kit, so this page won’t guess one. Kits vary by retailer and what you already own — check the vendors linked on the equipment page before you buy.

Neither of these sources gives a per-game pay rate, so there’s no way to say honestly how many games it takes to earn the $99 back. Ask your assignor what games in your area pay once you’re registered — see Getting Assignments for how that works.