[sloth]

I'll defend parepat on this one. Working the sidelines is a balance. You need to maintain order but you also need to be considerate of the coaches opportunity to coach. In a lot of rural stadiums there is not a lot of room in which the team and coaches are able to comfortably move. If a coach is calling signals, he need to be able to be seen by the captain of the O or D. Betwen plays I have no problem with a coach moving out onto the field a little bit so that his team can see him.

Believe it or not, I've found that if you try to work with the coaching staff they are more than willing to be very cooperative and considerate of giving me room to work. It may just be my personality, but I don't want to create conflict when there really doesn't need to be any. There will come plenty of conflict during the game with calls and non-calls. Throwing the flag for a coach that takes a step onto the field between plays is not an effective way to work with a coaching staff. If I run into a coach, he gets a flag, but this is a situation that I have encounter only twice in the past three years I've worked LJ at the varsity level.

As for the "bane" of all officials, I have never, ever been bothered by the "they let us do that last week" line. I simply point out that this is the way that we as a crew work and that for this game thats the way were going to have to do it...solves the problem pretty easy. Sometimes I'll come up with a witty response to break the ice and put the issue to rest.

I'm sure that I'll be burnt for this reply...but when I look at what matters we've done a great job as a crew. The coaches have been pleased that the games have been well called and that they haven't had to endure the LJ nazi in terms of how they conducted themselves (and I know this from the returned feed back cards that we give out at the start of the game to the head coaches). The one thing that puts my relationship to coaches in perspective is the nature of what we are doing out there. For a coach, that coaching job is a significant souce of income. This is his job. I'm a chemist, that is my job. I put on the stripes because I love to do it...not for the money. Therefore, I try to give him the utmost latitude when dealing with him.