players on the floor-held ball situation

[ChrisSportsFan]

Whenever there's a held ball situation, it try to get in right away and let players know I'm there.....let it go.....easy up.....or whatever is necessary. This weekend, my Son played in an 8th grade tournament and on the next court over there was a 7-8 year old tournament. This pee-wee game was officiated by only 1 official even though there was always another official sitting at the table whenever I looked over there. I guess that's how the director wanted to do it.

Skip forward a few minutes....as you can guess, they had several held ball situations. The official would hit his whistle several times but make no attemp to get close. I guess he figured it would never happen.

2 kids from red and 1 from blue all get their hands on the ball and noone is even considering letting go. Ref blows his whistle and kids keep pulling. He blows a few more times and now the kids fall but everyone holds on. They're rolling, twisting and pulling. Finally, one of the kids from the red team lets go, stands up and starts slugging one of the blue players. All the coaches from the blue team (they must have had 5 of them) and some parents are now on the floor grabbing their kids. I honestly think they all come out to help and that must be what the ref decided along with the tourn dir as they only shot 2 freethrows. (I figured it wasn't my game and my kid wasn't playing so I didn't worry about it much)

Anyway, watching this situation play out only reinforced to me why we must get in there and keep things under control. Does anyone have any additional comments or a story they could share with the group?