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Oh, and by the way, I had the same coach again on Saturday that I T'ed on Thursday night (the one I started this thread about). They were warming up at halftime of my first game and I told my partner "I'm going to take care of this right now". I went over and said "coach, is there anything we need to discuss from the other night?". She was very nice, said she was upset about my partner's call going against her in a tight game and was sorry, denied having said that we suck, she claimed it was "that's ridiculous". We then had a nice conversation about personal things (I knew her brother 5 or 6 years back) and everything went great. I believe this approach worked wonderfully in this situation, as I did not want any hard feelings carrying over into another game, and think this let the coach know that would be the case from my angle also. Just thought I would pass that on, may help some newbies handle coaches better. I wouldn't have have guts enough to approach a coach like this last season, but I have forced myself to work very hard on giving coaches the respect they deserve (when they deserve it, of course). This has helped my game management skills tremendously. Since I am obviously not perfect, one thing I probably did do wrong yesterday was let the fans get to me. One team had about two dozen fans that were very boisterous and loud, counting seconds in the lane all the way up to 9 or 10 (even when there wasn't anyone in there), telling me to "watch 31 she's holding in there" during dead balls. I finally let it get to me, and responded to one lady during the first of a two shot free throw when she told me to watch the three seconds. I said "lady, as long as you are yelling about it, I ain't gonna call it, you keep quiet and I'll get it". She said "oh", and some guy said "see". I know I shouldn't have, but it seemed to work at the time, btw, I never called it and told my partner at halftime (before I said this to her) that if he called it I would shoot him. I got a kick out of it because I stayed and watched two games after I was done to help out a couple of newer guys with mechanics and this same team was playing. They got a three second call in the third quarter of that game and I was sitting at the scorers table with my uniform and jacket on and I see this lady in the stands pointing at me and laughing because they finally got a call. I gave the touchdown signal to her and laughed about it to which she either thought was funny or I was the biggest smartass alive, but she was pointing and telling all the other parents about it.
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