|
Since everyone shared their experiences, I might as well explain what happened yesterday.
The league itself a large Church league featuring about 70+ teams spread over multiple divisions (3 or 4 divisions for 18 year old and above / the rest are kids from high school to 3rd / 4th grade, 5th / 6th, 7th /8th divisions). I played in the league for 25 years bu stopped around 2014. I stayed connected with the league by officiating.
The officiating situation is different too. Because of complaints over the years, the league went with the concept of "head officials". Basically they pay for one experienced official to manage the other officials who are players in the league. All teams in the league have to score keep and officiate throughout the summer. So as you can imagine, the quality of officiating is pretty bad at times.
So in my case yesterday, I had 3 games with one of the kids leagues (7th / 8th grade would be my guess, though I wasn't sure).
All the games were yawners. But it was the second game that had a weird vibe from the get go. Team #1 was complaining about calls. I guess it got to the point that one of the other officials gave a technical to the team that was complaining.
Team #2 had a guy who scored a basket and grabbed the ball and seemed like to me he was trash talking a bit.
At halftime, I just told both coaches to have their kids play ball as the weird vibe was there. The game went back and forth and was close until the end.
But this is where the weirdness finally showed. Team #1 had played with 5 players the whole game and out of the blue, a sixth player was in the game (this was super late, under 2 minutes left). I asked the other official about it to confirm if the kid was late as I remembered Team #1 had only 5 players in the book.
The other official said "yes, but I let it go since the game is a forfeit". I said "oh really, since when was this game a forfeit?" Apparently, team #2 had called in a forfeit and brought some other kids to just have a game. BUT I wasn't told.
At this point, I kind of just said "Ok, fine" and just let things go. But I told the other official to tell the coach of Team #1 (because the official was also the main guy who coordinated his church's teams including Team #1) that he can't just stick a guy in the game like that without penalty.
I also told this particular official (he does kids games, but he's not in a high school group or anything) that if you're going to have us officiate a game like this (and give a technical to his own team) then not having a player in the book was worthy of a technical as well. But it was super late and it would have created more drama that it was worth.
So now you understand why I asked. If I had known it was a forfeit, I would have just sat down and taken a break before working the 3rd and final game.
|