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Old Sun Dec 04, 2005, 06:46pm
Texas Aggie Texas Aggie is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 2,193
I let coaches talk and complain if they want to. Many of them are not necessarily doing it to be a jerk. They THINK one of two things: either they are sticking up for their players by being as vocal as the players are agressive, AND/OR, they believe they have to work you to get the calls to go both ways. At the frosh/JV levels, you are dealing with mostly inexperienced HS coaches, but also coaches that watch their varsity coaches, college coaches on TV, and have the experience from playing, that they can also think going balistic every now and then is the right thing to do.

Take care of business on the court first. If a coach asks a question, you can address it if during a dead ball. If not, I ignore them, unless they commit an infraction of the rules -- then I penalize it. But I also give them the impression that I am listening to them and understand what they are saying. "OK, coach" or "yes, sir/maam" works wonders in many situations and its underused by lesser experienced officials who are still taking criticism a little too personally.

I've been out of the game for a while and am getting back in this year. I've found that because I'm older, there's less of a confrontational tone by coaches. You may be younger in age, and in the process, be getting dealt with differently than the same coach would deal with me. Fair or not, I had to go through that as well, so just learn from it. But do your best not to engage coaches who aren't getting out of control. If they are getting out of control, by all means deal with it, but don't look for situations.

Finally, there are some coaches that just have a chip on their shoulder when it comes to officials. Do your stuff as best you can with them and don't worry about it. Usually, these are the 50+ year old JV coaches who aren't going anywhere or have been somewhere, failed, and blame us for their failures. You aren't going to win any battles with them, so don't try. Work hard, enforce the bench rules, keep the game under control, and I promise you that in the vast majority of situations, other things will take care of themselves.
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