Last night at an elementary summer league game, I was lead and A1 had the ball. A2 comes up from behind her and pushes her so my reflexes blow the whistle and call a foul the say she is on the same team? What would you do in this situation?

"MY ERROR!! Inadvertant whistle, A's ball. Here we go, ball is in!"

Exactly what I would do. You really don't have many options here. Unless you plan to give the foul against her teammate, I'm sure the coach wouldn't be too happy.

These situations are the worst, but my take on it is that we, as the official who screwed up put way to weight on the issue. I try to defuse these situations with humour, a little joke tends to lighten the mood. In more serious games, I just rule with an inadvertant whistle. It's all you can do. Chances are that most people won't even remember you messed up. I know that I overly dwell on situations like this, and it tends to affect my game, because instead of watching, my mind keeps going over the situation i screwed up on. So my advice, move on and don't dwell.

My thoughts exactly. Also, situations like this teach you to have a more patient whistle so that you call what you see rather than what you think you see. That, in turn, makes you a better official.

If the push didn't cause a travel, then I'm with everyone else. PS No matter how awful a mistake you pull, there's always someone here who's done something worse. Dont sweat the little stuff. Learn from the big stuff. Remember this the next time a partner pulls a bone-head move!

I once worked with a partner who made a mistake and yelled out, "Sorry, Referee Stupidity, Blue Ball!!!" Everyone in the gym had a good laugh over that one.

Travel?

If not, it's an elementary school summer game. 'Fess up to the accidental whistle, and play on. Trust me - the coaches have seen enough of this crazy stuff.

color blind......not
 

Years ago, men's independent tournament, early in the game I called a pushing foul on the rebound. Blue 14, push, white out of bounds, no big deal. I noticed several of the guys in blue frowning, mumbling to each other, etc. Finally several minutes later during a timeout, I asked one of the guys what the deal was about the call. I was told,
"Yeah, he pushed, but that was his teammate that he pushed."
My little light bulb slowly came on. Oh, I get it. All these guys did have on blue, but there were at least 3 different shades of blue. Oops, my bad. Next time somebody tell me!

Did A2's contact cause A1 to travel? If it did, you did not have an inadvertent whistle, you had traveling by A1.

MTD, Sr.

Am I missing something here? The whistle was for a foul (according to Brandan), as a result wouldn't the ball became dead at that point and thus you couldn't have a travel?

Seems to me that ref18's two comments "hit the nail on the head".

[Edited by ref20 on Jul 22nd, 2004 at 08:14 AM]

Ref18, isn't that pretty much exactly what I already said? :) I guess I said it in Referee-language, and you put it into layman's terms!

Here we go again!. :)

Hey, you'd be grumpy too if they wouldn't let you go on the Space Mountain ride at DisneyWorld because you weren't tall enough.

Chuck had a bad day yesterday.

Brandan I don't think you made an A*% of yourself at all and I don't think the coaches and the other official thought that either. I am in my first year also and have blown an inadvertant whistle twice in the past year, once with the exact same situation you had and another time on an outlet pass when the rebounder had established the pivot, picked it up and tweet I blew the whistle and didn't wait to see if the pivot was placed back on the ground. I was anticipating the travel instead of actually seeing it. On both calls all I did was say inadvertant whistle, talked to my partner to explain and continued on with the game. Neither time did the coaches complain, but both times asked what happened on the next dead ball (both were Freshman games) and were satisfied with my response. Everyone makes mistakes and most coaches know that.