[BillyMac]

And were we embarrassed. We gave the ball to the wrong team after a timeout.

Thank God it was only a Catholic Middle School junior varsity game, and it didn't affect the final score, but it was still embarrassing. In hindsight, this is what happened.

There were a couple of out of bounds calls in a short succession along my partner's endline, and all the players stayed down there due to good backcourt defensive pressure. Ball goes out of bounds off of Visitor, and during the ensuing dead ball, one of the coaches requests and is granted a timeout. My partner, a pretty good official, has been on this endline during this entire succession of plays, sounds his whistle to grant the request. He looks at me, expecting to "bump the timeout" to me, because I'm closest to the table, poor mechanics, I know, but "accepted" in this league, I don't know who requested the timeout, so I motion to him to report the timeout, which he does, and he then goes back to his endline.

That little hesitation in the "bump" routine, or in this case, the "non-bump" routine, lost the focus for both of us. I'm at the circle during the timeout, and he's at his endline. After the timeout, he calls out, "Visitor ball", points, and hands the ball to the Visitor for a throwin. Visitor completes the throwin, after which the ball goes out of bounds off Home.

At this point, the Home coach questions the throwin after the time out. I confer with my partner, the Home coach is correct, we screwed up, and I mean we, as in both of us, I'm taking half the blame. I apologize to the Home coach, which he seems to accept, but then he gets a little upset that we will not be giving the ball to the Home team. "Coach, I'm sorry that we blew it, but it's not a correctable error. There's nothing in the rulebook that allows us to fix this. I'm not fixing a mistake by making another mistake", and we play on, with a throwin by Visitor.

Our former local interpreter used to say, "When the ball is dead, we must be alive". He always warned us about this situation, and advised us to communicate information with our partners during timeouts, and offered us suggestions like holding the ball to one side, or the other, or in front of us, or behind us, to remind us which way the ball was going after a timeout.

Embarrassed as hell. First time on over thirty years. I offer my interpreter's statement again, for the benefit of rookies. "When the ball is dead, we must be alive". It's true. It's true. Don't let this happen to you.