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Girls varsity game early this season. Visitors have two coaches -- a man and a woman. Every action tells me he is the head coach and she is the assistant. We do the pregame with the coaches and he attends; as the the players are introduced, he shakes their hands; first time out by V and he calls it A minute later I see both two coaches standing ... one towards the table; the other at the other end of the bench. At the next dead ball, I tell the man that only he can stand. He tells me that they are "co-coaches." I say they can be whatever they want, but for this game he is the head coach and only he can stand.
Next time down the court, I am the lead, and I see she is standing and coaching. I call a T on her -- as the assistant standing. When I get to the table, my partner and the man greet me. The man says that she is the head coach today and she will stand. He said he explained that to me when I talked to him earlier...I said that he had taken every action possible to prove he was the head coach and for this game, he was the head coach. My partner called me aside and asked me to reconsider the T. Now I feel stuck. The rule, case book and point of emphasis all back me. She was not saying a word to me...she was coaching the players. But now I am told that she is the head coach and I can't penalize a head coach for coaching from the coaching box. So I take the T back. The home coach doesn't like it, but he accepts the explanation....the T was for the assistant standing, but since she is not the assistant, she is acting within the rules.
At halftime, my partner gave me the "Don't go looking for trouble" talk. He may have been Old School for all I know. because he said exactly what OS said (if they are not screaming at you, ignore them...no matter where they are standing.) When I had that team a few weeks later, the man made a point of coming up to me during warmups and saying he would be sitting and she would be the head coach for the game ... but he also gave me the, "No one else has said a thing to us all year" line.
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