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What a deal!
High School JV girls. In the first half, Team B is advancing the ball near the division line. One of Team A's players has stopped near her bench, apparently to tell the coach about some relatively minor injury. Team B's coach took it upon himself to call for a timeout, which I granted. He then told me the other team had an injured player - that's why he called for the timeout. I looked for somebody lying on the floor. There was no such person. I said that was very gracious of him, and charged the timeout. He became visibly, but not unacceptably, displeased, and - even though we had already wasted 30 seconds with the issue while he absorbed the reality - I gave him the full timeout time. A pretty good analogy for what happened would be 'some guy offers to buy someone else lunch, then gets bent out of shape when the waiter presents the bill'. As gracious as the coach's actions were, they were equally presumptuous. If he had wanted to stop action (a la soccer), he could have instructed his player to pick up her dribble, or to throw the ball out of bounds. Instead, he chose to, in effect, attempt to usurp the officials' judgment and authority.
That was the semi-sane part of the game. Some minutes into the second half, Team A's athletic director (site manager, A is the home team) who is doing the 30-second clock, informs me that Team B has no coach. We had, apparently, been playing for several minutes without a coach on Team B's bench. I asked Team B team where the coach was. They said he had gone to the locker room with the varsity. (Team B had shown up with only the varsity coach for both teams). I told the fans we were experiencing a TV timeout. The coach was retrieved. I considered what penalty or penalties might properly apply. At an absolute minimum, under 10-5-1 & 10-5-2, surely the coach had earned a T for leaving (by perhaps record distance!) the coach's box.
But here's where it got tricky. If he were to get another T, both the JV and Varsity games would be forfeit - on senior night for Team A. Considering that, and his previous attempt at sporting behavior, and despite his egregious violation of State Association rules, the penalty for which seemed to me properly the business of his school system or the State Association, I had the ball put back in play.
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