Roughest game this season - and it was girls!

[Mark Padgett]

Had three HS girls rec games yesterday. The first two went fairly well, although I did T up a coach (so what's new?). The third game, however, was totally different. The two teams had fairly tall girls in the post and at the forward positions so they kept fighting for post and rebounding position. My partner and I called quite a few fouls in the first half - double bonus both ways, but that was just a precursor of what was to come. About three minutes into the second half, A1 in the post throws an elbow into the face of B1 and knocks her down. Partner calls a flagrant. About a minute later, B1 does the same thing to A2 - I guess she was trying to retaliate. I tossed her. Within another ten minutes, we had almost 20 foul calls, four were intentional and another two were flagrant. During all this, we spoke with both coaches twice and told them to get their teams to knock it off. It didn't work. We thought about just calling the game, but we didn't know how the league would react to that, so we decided to just continue to call all the fouls and hope that everyone would foul out. Finally, the clock ran out and I got to go home. Before I left, I wrote a report on the back of the score sheet that is picked up by a league representative later in the day.

The only "good" news was that all the fouls didn't make the game longer. It was running clock.