[devdog69]

Originally posted by Hawks Coach
Finally got a direct T the other night. Here's the sitch. Girls 8th grade summer travel league, come out of halftime with opponents getting the ball. We have a 4 point lead. Opponents put six players on the court. We yell to the ref administering the throw-in, he looks at us, hands the ball over, and they inbound and score within about ten seconds. The entire time we are yelling to both refs that there are six players on the court. Both refs at one point or another make eye contact, and continue on with play. To be more clear, this is a quiet gym (as gyms go) and we have not directed a single comment to the officials all night (so we have not trained them to ignore us ).

As we inbound, the opposing coach actually gets his players attention and gets one to come over to the sideline (at this point, everyone except the refs is aware of what is going on). As she steps off the court, I finally get my point across to the trail and he stops play. He assesses a team tech to my opponents and a direct to me for being on the court. I look down and my feet are both within a foot of the sideline, but yes, on the court directly in front of my bench (I was not running across the court like a lunatic). I felt it was an attempt to save face. The opposing coach is a friend and he is just dying laughing, because he knows he got away with one.

End result - they get a basket (not a correctable error), we get ball but lose arrow, and nobody shoots the FTs because of the simultaneous Ts. So yeah, we coaches have those nights too.

I think we will all agree that this was not handled well and it smells of an inexperienced pair of officials. It takes some time to get a sense of when to ignore the yelling from the bench/crowd and when something actually needs to be heard. Good experienced officials would never have put the ball in play to start with. Thanks for having the patience to not completely degrade these newer officials, they need to get some valuable experience somewhere. All in all I would say you may have gotten lucky. Sounds to me like by the time the official realized the other team had gotten the sixth off the court, at which time it is too late to penalize. They could have just given you the direct technical and not penalized the other team. Now, that would have been a good story.