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Originally posted by momstwo
Just another Ref: Thank you for your advice. I obviously touched a sore spot with alot of people on here. Yes, she and the rest of her team came off the court commenting about the officating. (keep in mind three of the girls were bleeding and a few other banged up) But you are absolutely right that is how it SHOULD have been handled. Like I said before Im not the parent in the stand yelling. This one was hard to stomach though, and Im sorry if that bothers some people in here. I am new to this my children have been playing for three years and this is the first time I have ever had this happen. Wrong place to post obviously. Now maybe all the ones that chewed me out will sleep a little better cause for a change they got to chew on a parent..
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Mom -- I've been away from the board for a few hours, being a mom, and a ref, both in the same evening. I have raised three kids, and I'm still raising a fourth, and I've reffed at least three thousand games so far, and I've seen a lot of sports from both perspectives, and I can tell you that it's you that's blowing things out of proportion, not us.
I learned the lesson about refs being truly biased when my daughter was playing about 12 years ago. She was a freshman, playing varsity, and they went to the state tournament. The reffing was so blatantly one-sided, that when I signed up to ref, and brought up that game, it was remembered by the person who had been in charge of refs for that tournament.
After the game was over, my daughter's coach got all the girls and all the parents in the locker room and gave them a talk. "You can't blame it on the refs. WHen they're prejudiced like that [my daughter, the coach and the whole team except one player, were black] you just have to rise above it. You didn't do that. You let them get under your skin, and you got rattled. Would you have won with different refs? Who knows? It doesn't matter, cuz these were the refs we had. Now you go home and figure out how to win tomorrow. Forget today. Let's do well enough tomorrow that even with the same refs, we'll win. You are all great players. You are all stars. You can do this, and don't let any stupid red-necks take it away from you. It's your attitude that counts, not theirs."
I learned a lesson from that speech. As a parent, you can't protect your child from all the bad things that happen. You do the best you can to protect them, and then you have to help them face the rest. Okay, so they had a bad game and some of them got hurt. Well, that probably shouldn't have happened, but it did. Give the kids bandaids for the scratches, wipe their tears, and talk about what's next. Making the whole thing into a federal case tells the girls that they don't have to control their own attitudes, and it's okay to blame bad things on someone else. This doesn't help them grow up.
As a ref, what I've seen is that if the players are allowed to blame their problems on the refs, they don't get better. The best teams, the best coaches, the best players adjust to the reffing that's at hand, and play through it. Girls the age of your daughter aren't going to be able to do that very well, physically, but you can at least start teaching them the concept.
"Yea, maybe that ref doesn't have much experience, but that doesn't matter. Let's work on good chest passes. I want to see every one dribble the ball at least once during this game. Who hasn't had a turn yet?" And so on , and so forth.
It might be a good thing to let the assignor or trainer know that this ref has some things to work on, but you don't say it like, "This ref cost my little Susie that game". The wording is, "How do you want your refs to handle such and such a situation? What is the rule about such and so?" Listen, listen, listen. Then the responst is, "Well you might want to talk to #39. I"m not sure he has that concept fully down-loaded yet." ANd that's it. Nothing else. The more you say, the less the assignor will listen.
Lastly, (yea, I'm a preacher in my spare time!) you really need to learn how to handle it when your daughter loses, and you need to teach her how to handle it. Do you know how many basketball games Michael Jordan lost in his lifetime? I don't know the exact number, but it's way more than half the games he played. MORE THAN HALF!!!! Nobody wins all their games. Anyone that does, never learns, never grows, never improves. Please do everyone around you a favor and find a way to get past the Little League Mom stuff. It's definitely not good parenting.