Technical Foul Question

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by JRutledge

... I was waiting for him to do something I could easily pin on him ...

Many years ago. Girls varsity prep school game. With seconds to go in the first half, girl trips (she didn't get tripped, she tripped) and severely hurts her knee. Head coach and trainer come out to attend to her in front of her bench. During the several minutes it took to attend to her, the coach has a few irate words for us (more than just one outburst) to indicate his displeasure in my partner and I "causing his player to get hurt". We should have said, "Shut up and deal with your player's injury. You're not allowed out here on the floor to take pot shots at us" (or something more professional than that), but not wanting to detract from the serious injury situation in front of us, my partner and I both physically retreated away from the situation on the floor to the opposite table side of the court, and passed on a well deserved technical foul.

At halftime, in the privacy of the dressing room, we discussed it and decided that the severity of the injury, and our concern for the injured player, "numbed" us to the poor behavior of the coach, but that he "wouldn't get away with it", and that he would be immediately T-ed up for any unsporting comment, no matter how slight, in the second half (probably unprofessional to make him an automatic T-target, but he deserved it).

Decades later, and we're still waiting for that unsporting comment. We missed our chance and he got away with murder.

We always seem to regret the technical fouls we passed on. We never seem to regret the technical fouls we issued.

More than forty years and this one might be the one that I regret the most.