Quote:
Originally Posted by chartrusepengui
I like being able to look across the court and know who is "official".
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One other beneficial thing about knowing to whom to report at the table is this. On the floor, communication between officials is essential. And much communication transpires by the visual cues we each give each other: the slight nod of the head, the discreet thumb-up, the brief hand to the chest confirming one has the last shot, squaring up on the play to show one is on-ball, the open hand to delay making the ball live, etc.
Does anyone else sense how such visual cues also seem to be important when communicating with the official scorer?
Knowing to whom to report offers the opportunity to verify that he/she "got it". Usually this verification occurs when, after receiving the information, the scorer looks down, turning his/her attention from receiving your communication to the book to record it. Other times it comes by a slight nod of the head.
When a quizzical look on the face of a scorer takes place after reporting a foul, for instance, that's when I know I better clarify what I'm trying to communicate so we get things right.
I had a scorer last Thursday who, while we would report a foul, always had his head down, recording the foul based on what he thought he saw on the floor rather than what we were reporting. Drove me crazy until I discreetly told him to wait until after we reported it.
About as crazy as when timers click the next team foul forward before we report it so that when we look up at the board to see if it'll be a one-and-one, we see the number of fouls resulting from the call we haven't yet reported. Many correctable error situations could be avoided if the timers wouldn't do that.