I got a call yesterday afternoon from an assignor to see if I could work a girls JV rec spring game that evening. I took the game and was glad to see a guy I've worked with many times before there as the other official. In these leagues, uniform rules are extremely casual but we do check the hair closely for clips, etc. One girl had pigtails that were braided and seemed to be about three inches long. Didn't raise any red flags.
It was standard NF rules except we played 16 minute halves and all five timeouts by each team were 30's (a great idea, BTW). We started the game and, as I anticipated, we had about 10 held balls in the first five minutes. About halfway through the first half, the girl with the pigtails was playing post and received a pass. She pivoted to go to the hoop and one of her pigtails hit her defender right in the eye! Yikes. Her scream sounded like something out of a Freddy Krueger movie. The defender went down like a truck hit her. We both blew our whistles to stop play and I called the coach out to the floor. The girl then stood right up and said she was fine.
Yeah, you guessed it. I got an argument from that coach, not because of the pigtails, but because I told him he had to sub that player.
The game got scarier as it went along because neither team could muster more than a four point lead. With just over a minute to go, it was tied. I was afraid I was going to break my streak of over 20 seasons without an OT game when all of a sudden, one team got a bad case of the turnovers. It wasn't anything we did, they just bounced the ball off their own feet OOB twice and threw two passes away OOB. They lost by four.
Somebody up there likes me.
