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As a fairly new official (2nd year HS) one of the things that I have worked on and learned the most about this year is about dealing with coaches. I had a couple of instances this week that reinforced my belief that effective communication with coaches is very important and that failure to handle coaching problems can lead to events and comments like, "This was the worst officiated game ever." My first couple of instances, which I thought were generally effective were during a girls' varsity/JV double. In the early varsity game an underdog team was hanging with one of the area's elite teams, and the elite team began to pull away in the 4th quarter. The coaches had been barking early, but were effectively controlled through warnings. With 2 minutes to go, a player got injured and I informed the coach when she got to the bench that he had 30 seconds to replace her, to which he replied, "I know my job, you should know how to do yours," to which I responded with a technical. After the game the coach went out of his way to approach me about the technical call, and started to make some personal comments, to which I responded by telling him that he'd better leave for his own good because his conduct would be included in my game report. He left promptly. In the JV game, V HC sat on the bench and commented with some bench personnel and I heard some griping from the players. I told JV HC to control his bench and sure enough, he didn't take my warning seriously and I called a technical on a bench player for loudly objecting to a call later in the half. The bench was very cooperative for the rest of the game.
My other instance occurred in a boys varsity game later that week. There was a decent crowd and both coaches were rather animated. One thing that I've noticed is that when coaches get animated, that tends to turn the whole atmosphere against the officials involved. While my partner and I discussed bench decorum throughout the game and issued warnings to both benches early, nobody crossed the line to earn a T. To make matters worse, it was an extremly sloppy game. However, the crowd was extremely hostile, and although after thoroughly analyzing our performance in the postgame my partner and I decided that we did a good job officiating in terms of our judgement, etc. I didn't have the perfect game (we both missed out of bounds calls, but the other official was able to provide help), but my assessment was that we did fairly well, yet some commented that it was "the worst officiated game." In hindsight, I think that the failure to put a lid on the benches led to that perception and it re-emphasized to me the need to commmunicate and TCB early with the coaches. Sorry for the long post, just wanted to get it all out.
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