I know here fans pay alot of attention to the race of the officials unfortuantly. Our chapter president told me one time after an all black crew worked two predominantly white schools district match that this was the first time that had probably happend and that they do have request from coaches depending on whos playing who, etc. Still in this day and age. And its mostly the guys who have been around for a while. The younger coaches dont care, they just want good officials. I learned how easy it is to be profiled this weekend when working with two white co-officils -or two black co-officials - two women co-officials. Fans will use anything against you if they feel like your screwing them.

Re: Race
 

Basketball may be in the process of becoming a much more of an international sport, but it is not that way in this country right now. I know if you talk about the amount of officials in soccer in my state, you can find people from all kinds of backgrounds that officiate soccer.

If comments are holding back officials, then shame on them for letting comments from idiots hinder their opportunities. I have been called many things over the years and that has never hindered me from trying to officiate. I have even officiated in towns where white supremacy groups have held rallies to recruit and intimidate many people of color and other people they do not like.

At least where I live it is not that people from different countries are not given opportunities, I just do not know many that even try. Soccer tends to be king amongst people that are not originally from this country. Or baseball for those that come from the Spanish speaking countries. When I look around as a baseball umpire, there are not many that look like me. There are not many that play baseball either that have my background either. You cannot control everything.

Peace

Could you be any more obnoxious?

I suppose he could be. He could be a Duke fan. . .

Mike is one of the good guys here, jb. I haven't looked at the link, but I doubt that he posted it simply to be obnoxious.

Chuck,
I suggest not looking at it.
I opened it up and <U>within hours I was seriously spammed</U>.
mick

If he's one of the good guys, he needs to work a little harder at it. The link is patently condescending.

Re: Race
 

-------------------------------
Chuck,

I am well aware that you are one of the good guys around here. Having read your posts for several years now, I can say with little hesitation that you would never post a link to a website about punctuation when responding to a post which contained some errors in grammar, syntax or punctuation.

What really galls me about JR's post is its unwarranted sanctimoniousness. It should be clear to anyone with even rudimentary understanding of linguistics that the above post was written by someone for whom English is a second language. There are several clues that, when taken together, tell the story:

1) the level of vocabulary is good-to-very good
2) the sentence construction, while at times cumbersome,
is very ambitious.
3) several of the errors involve failing to properly
pluralize nouns.
4) problems with participles

When the level of vocabulary and complexity of sentence structure exemplified in the above post are taken in tandem, the "simple" mistakes made by the writer clearly don't fit; and they won't fit until one allows for the possibility that the writer is not a life-long speaker of English. Such English-speakers simply do not make the number of errors in noun pluralization that one sees there. Furthermore, there are a couple more "simple" mistakes with participles, which are a notoriously difficult part of learning a new language.

So, the first point is to take JR to task for not having enough mastery of his primary language to recognize when it was being written by someone for whom English is a second language.

The second point is directed to XXSMen: I want you to know that I did not post this in order to criticize your English; in fact, I wrote this to praise it. Your English is excellent, and you are to be commended for what has clearly been a tremendous amount of work on your part in developing fluency. I only wish I had worked as hard at my foreign language study as you have with yours.

Good luck in your hoops career. I recognize that there are barriers before you that I don't have to face, and I can only say that I will do my best to be active in trying to break down such barriers where they exist.

jb