|
Rookie Mistake
I hate to admit this, but I still remember a mistake I made over twenty-years ago in a junior varsity game. After a made free throw, I called a ten-second backcourt violation. The coach went nuts because only 8 seconds had ticked off the clock since the made free throw. I had to give him a technical foul, one of the few given throughout my career. In the car on our way home after the game, my partner and I discussed the play. We wondered if the timekeeper had started the clock too late, or if I had counted too fast. We finally figured out that because of a pressing defense, the inbounding team had taken four seconds to get the ball inbounds, and I had mistakenly carried over the four second count into my ten second count. I knew the correct rule, I just screwed it up. After the ball was inbounded, I only counted six more counts, in eight seconds, to call the violation. I called the athletic director the next day and asked her to apoligize to the coach for me. The next time I saw the coach, we both laughed about it.
Our local board interpreter now advises us to use two different arms to make these two counts so this mistake doesn't happen. If we make the five second count with our right arm, we switch over to our left arm for the ten second count. Our interpreter also advises us to switch arms as we change our five second closely guarded counts, from a dribbling count to a holding count or from a holding count to a dribbling count.
|