Would you make this call? Why or why not?

[wildcatter]

Originally Posted by VaTerp

One of the two main people who trained me, who assigns HS and some college ball, consistently said "don't make violations your best call." Not saying you are doing that at all here but his point was that while you should get all of the obvious violations, your focus should be on having high accuracy with fouls and judgement on contact situations.

For me, there is some advantage/disadvantage and game management consideration to some violations. I'm passing on some carrying violations, non-obvious travels that occur 60 plus feet away from the basket and with no defender present.

As Adam said, check your local listings. My current assigner for most of the HS games I work supports this "philosophy" and believes this is a common sense approach to officiating.

I realize that many will disagree.

Thanks VaTerp. I'm with you on the principle that it's important to get all of the obvious violations. I also want to make sure any violation I call is one I'm very sure of.

So it's an erring-on-the-side-of-slooooow, measured count to 10 on FTs (I've only called one of those, 9-10 years ago when I was in college reffing intramurals). But also, if it's more common violation like a travel or BC, I want to make sure I saw it.

It's a different philosophy than with fouls, particularly on clear PCs/blocks with significant contact. Hopefully I got a great look and know the call is right, but even if I'm not 100%, I'm blowing my whistle to call what I think is best based off what I saw.

The point is, advantage/disadvantage is inherently subjective, and it makes sense that fouls are where you want to focus like the big dog who trained you said.

And this is not really disagreeing with you, but I don't really see passing on a violation as part of game management, like I would on borderline fouls. I call any violation I'm sure I saw, no matter where it is or what the score is. I don't feel like it's in my power to ignore a rule violation. If I see a 3 second call (and I'm sure it's 3+ seconds), I call it (game flow can go both ways). Where trouble starts occurring is when my partner doesn't call it. I know consistency is critical, and it just drives me nuts because the easiest thing from a consistency perspective is to go by one set of policies/rules... the rulebook. But I get it 100% that local listings may vary and I should shut up about it because I am not a big dog. I just moved to a new state anyway, so maybe that philosophy is something I will have to unlearn.