|
I had two games with similar situations in the last two week.
The first was a boys sophomore game between a school with good teams in every category and a school with a middle-of-the-road program. The outcome is pretty clear early in the game. The visiting team is going to get crushed.
We're trying to let them play...giving the visiting team the benefit of the doubt on a lot of situations (more than we're giving the home team once the score difference gets pretty wide). We were trying to talk the visiting team out of fouls. The home coach, who is very intelligent and classy, recognizes the situation, and instead of complaining about it, informs his team during a time out to just keep playing and play with class, that we might let some fouls by the other team go uncalled.
Still, there are complaints...from the visiting coach. He feels we're letting the home team get away with too much and his team is not capable of fouling. He persists and insists we tighten up. The only result if his actions were that his player started getting even rougher.
To keep the game from getting out of control and to stop the escalation of the contact, we were forced to tighten up...just as the coach was ingnorantly pleading for...only the balance of calls that followed were dramatically against his team (and they would have been if we had been tighter at any point in the game).
It made for a long game and, suprisingly, he didn't say a word the rest of the night. The game ended without incident.
On the other game...similar story but in a boys varsity game. Mediocre team and a relatively bad team. Once again, the team that wasn't very good is getting the benefit of the doubt (once the difference becomes apparent) but they only escalates the contact as a result. Their coach is doing the only complaining. We reel it back in by telling the coaches that we are going to tighten up...don't want to suprise them. Again, the calls end up going against the team that was getting beat (with several also going against the better team) but it was necessary to ensure an uneventful outcome.
Neither game was any fun and I really don't like taking the actions we were compelled to take (calling it as tight as we ended up doing). But, I'm going to do what it takes to keep the game from blowing up. Unfortunately, some coaches/teams just don't have a realistic view of their team and/or the game.
|