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Insights
The higher the level, the smarter the coach. New officials are usually working the lower level games. It is somewhat scary that a first-year official is concerned about giving technicals to coaches for yelling.
Call selection is of paramount importance. Judgment will be the main factor in your advancement as a basketball official. As your judgment and call selection improves, you will get less resistance from coaches and players. That's just a fact of life.
When I hear/see a coach or player show negative emotion with respect to a call that is made by me or someone on my crew, I immediately ask myself several questions:
Does he have a reason to suspect the call was bad, either from his angle vs. the calling official or the consistency/context of the game? If the answer is yes, yo need to let the coach player vent for a short period of time, then work to de-escalate the situation. "Hey, I know what you saw, but we saw it from a better angle, and it was OK." "Hey, everyone knows you didn't like it. You made your point. We need to move on or you get your T. Make a decision." "Hey, yeah, we should have gotten that. We out here working hard and trying."
Does the coach want a T? Sometime the coach will yell loudly until he gets T'd, because he wants one. If you can listen to him/her after the T, you'll know whether he wanted it or not.
Ever ask a coach, "Do you want one, at this point in the game? I'm not sure you do..." How do you tihnk he will react to that?
In all these situations, you need to put yourself into the other person's position. For a player, they get about 2 seconds to vent in a non-profane way. For a coach, they may get about 3-4 seconds. It's an emotional game. If you can understand where their emotion comes from, and try and quickly address it, it heads off problems. Then the T becomes their choice, not yours. They made you do it.
Understand though, until your judgment and call selection does not lead to a lot of negative emotions, fair or unfair, that's where the focus should be. You can learn a lot by taking some crap, and really listening to the complaints, and putting yourself in their shoes. I cringe when I think of the calls I made during my first few years. And yes, there were times I should have T'd folks when I did not. But I will tell you that I learned a lot more from restraint and introspection about the causes of the negative emotion than whacking everyone.
Food for thought. Before everyone jumps on this, profanity or personal insults not repeatable in a business setting are automatic. Pointed feedback that may not be comfortable--gray area. When I have to give one, the entire gym knows why, because there is always the physical reeaction from the offender to correlate with the verbal, and I am never question3ed about the validity. "Hey, he made me do it, and I'm not happy about it at all." Think about it.
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