[Pantherdreams]

My personal feeling is block before contact is going to be a no call unless the contact after the block has happened is excessive or unnecessary. Tough to disadvantage a shooter when his/her shot is over and on the way to the floor.

I understand the need to protect the airborne shooter, but I'm not sure what the are being protected from. If they are being protected from a slap on the wrist or a bump they could easily absorb maybe they should be in a different sandbox with less contact: tennis, chess, swimming . . .

General rule of thumb if it is contact i would accept as inadvertant and able to be handled on the subway or line at the grocery store I don't need to protect kids from it.

If you want to protect the shooter I get that, just make sure you are protecting them not rewarding them for getting airborne. I also think a lot of this probably has to do with the nature of the basketball games you officiate. If you do a lot of games with larger athletes, where blocks &/ dunks are a regular occurrence and kids are used to playing this way you probably see less calls here as kids manage. The tough ones come in games where you've got 1 or 2 players who can make these sorts of plays but the rest of players strength, body control, game in general cannot handle this sort of play.