Preventative Officiating

[ChuckElias]

Originally posted by zebraman
Thanks so far guys. Much appreciated.

What I'm really looking for is specific things you do to be preventative.

For example:

Going to the table at the 12:00 minute mark before a game to give yourself two minutes to correct any book problems to avoid starting the game with an administrative T.

Reminding the defense of the throw-in plane on a throw-in to prevent them from reaching through the plane.

Notifying the coach when he/she is out of time-outs to prevent them from taking that extra time-out which results in a T.

I do each of these. But to be honest, I don't do a lot of other "preventative" things. I'm more along Kev's lines. You want to prevent handchecking? Call one in the first 90 seconds of the game. The coach will either tell his player it's a good call and cut it out, or s/he will moan to you: "You're going to call that?!?" To which you reply "All night, Coach".

At a recent CBOA meeting, Tom Lopes said to us something along the lines of. . . "After all these years of officiating, I finally figured it out. I finally figured out how to have smooth games. First two minutes of the game: handcheck on this end, handcheck on that end, 3-seconds. After that, they keep moving and keep their hands off each other."