[crosscountry55]

Had a physical, man-to-man varsity boys game on a 94-ft floor this evening. There were two of us. With a shot clock.

Ugh.

So my last four seasons have been 3-person. And in those places, officials get the angles, and get the early off-ball holds and pushes in the post, etc. Coaches don’t complain. Players adjust. Freedom of movement improves. The game “slows down” and is enjoyable to work.

This year, I’m finding that I’m still wired to get the post play garbage. Yeah, it’s harder and I can’t see it all, but I’m moving to improve and calling what I can. I’m also finding, frustratingly, that few of my partners have this mentality. They seem to be interested only in the stuff you can see from the eighth row. You call a common foul off-ball around here and your partner rolls his eyes while the affected coach questions what he sees as a phantom call as though you’d pierced his soul. On top of that, the players, since they are not used to the scrutiny, don’t adjust well.

I spent many years going to camps and working on my 3-p skills to slow the game down for myself. Suddenly it’s at warp speed again. And the only way to slow it down, as my partner from tonight suggested, is to focus on violations, just get the hard fouls, and sort of “officiate in a state of zen.”

I considered taking a year off because I’m only here for a year and I hate 2-p. Some of you may have remembered me considering this. But in the end I didn’t want to miss a whole year of seeing plays. The game evolves without you; it’s tougher to jump back in after time off. Plus I like getting out of the house and I relish challenges. So here I am. But gosh is it frustrating.

I’m not going to lie and say I had my best game tonight. Frankly it sucked. I had a questionable and meaningless block call in the first half and (gulp) a BI (CI) that I called from the L in transition (I was right there even with the basket, older partner was 47 feet away...got caught up overthinking it and made an impatiently crap call). But would either of these things (and a few others) have occurred if I knew that two sets of eyes had my back instead of one? I honestly don’t think so.

The worst part was the post-game. Discretion being the better part of valor, I bit my tongue while my partner provided “pointers” about “improving as an official.” It was internally humiliating; here I am a 10-year official being schooled as though a 3rd. Some of the points were perfectly valid (see aforementioned concession about sucky game above), but through it all, I’m thinking to myself, “I’m not the one with the dated ‘let them play through it’ philosophy here.” We just couldn’t seem to get on the same page. It showed. I’m struggling with the reversion to swallowing my whistle like we all used to before the freedom of movement revolution. Part of me knows I have to adapt to Rome, but the other part of me doesn’t want to develop lax habits that I carry into future seasons. It’s a conundrum.

Did I mention how much I hate 2-person? And what it does to the game in a given area where it’s employed?


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