Quote:
Originally posted by bebanovich
I am a coach who is always reevaluating my philosophy on interacting with officials during games and I would like input from thoughtful refs. When I got back into coaching a couple of years ago after a long layoff, I decided that I was going to put all of my game energy into coaching the bench and was not going to say anything to officials during the games (except when necessary for a clarification or conference, etc).
Without going into too much detail, my biased but considered opinion is that by the end of my first game back I really did my team a disservice and allowed the opposing coach to clearly gain an edge in terms of how the game was officiated (by a relatively young crew) in this case. After that game, I decided that I couldn't just say nothing and needed another plan.
In our league, we mostly use a particular organization and I found myself working for more calls (with self-imposed limits that I can go into if anyone is interested), with mixed results - never really feeling good about this but at least feeling like everything was evening-out in the end. Anyway, I kept hammering away the same way every game until our tournament when officials from a different organization were brought in. At the end of the first quarter, one of the officials came over and pointed out that a call I was demanding on our opponent was really going to hurt my team and our style if he started to mete it out how I wanted it it at both ends. The only other thing I said to officials all night was a quip to the same ref as he ran by and it ended up being a tournament win for us.
Since then I am much more selective about the types of calls being made and the crew before I open my mouth. My question is - is the pressure/chatter from coaches a necessary evil in this equation? I'm sure there must be some temptation to just mandate that they all sit down and shut-up except to coach the kids. But there must also be times where a coach says something that rings true to you and might legimately influence the flow of the game and the calls, or even just one call or situation.
I am sure you have seen colleagues who are more vulnerable to an angry or smooth-talking coach than others. I have run across one official who gave a T to a coach who asked for a clarification on the type of contact involved in a foul - thankfully it wasn't me. How much a part of the game is the coach's interaction with officials and is it OK that it is any part of the game? Is it a positive factor as long as you can control them well?
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I was approached by the new high school varsity coach with just your question. She was a championship D3 college player, plenty competitive, but she is - all to her and her parents' credit I would say - a well-mannered and polite adult. She felt that opposing coaches were gaining an advantage, that the squeaky wheel was inevitably getting some grease (if it didn't crash and burn first, to melange the metaphor).
At the time I told her I thought she should hold to her personal style, that officials would be appreciative of her behavior and be sure not to let another coach's more demonstrative behavior create any edge. After some reflection, though, I felt differently. But what could she do?
Last night I had a specific example of how a coach can be assertive without being out-of-line. The (ultimately) winning coach only said a few things to me in the course of the game. One was to ask me to keep an eye on the other team interfering with the ball after a made basket. I told him I thought the opponents had reflexively pushed the ball towards the endline, and, in the little gym we were in, it had bounced off the wall before his team got to it. He agreed that nothing flagrant had happened, but, he said, his team depended on fastbreaking, so, if I would keep an eye on it . . . he sensitized me to an element of the game of particular importance to his team. Not a bad move.