During the coaches meeting prior to a Varsity contest, one of the coaches said to my partner & I that he would be sitting during this game and his assistant would be utilizing the coaches box. My partner, a fourth year official, immediately replied that this could not happen. I was the referee, with 15 years expierence, and was perplexed by his response. Not a common topic of pre-game meetings and never had this come up before, I must admit I was thinking how I should react to this.
Here is what I did (good, bad or indifferent) and I just shot from the hip: I asked the head coach to bring his assistant over to this meeting (which he did) and then annointed him the 'head coach" for the night.I explained the coaches box priveledge to the 'new' head coach and then told the 'old' head coach that as far as we were concerned, he was now an assistant, a bench member and could not utilize the 6' coachees box for this ballgame. I then asked him if this was the way that he wanted to approach this and his reply was in the affirmative. I did follw up with the scorer and the other teams coach and got on with the ballgame.
My question is to any of you out there who have expienenced this, or not, if I acted approrpriately or was out of line. Incidently, we had no problems with the bench decorum that night, the 'new' head coach used the box religiously and the 'old' head coach just sat there with only 1 small lapse, which when reminded of the situation camly sat back down. Please respond and lemme know how you feel..

Bravo on your handling of the situation. Especially notifying the proper people of the change(opposing coach, table, etc..) All we have to do is give ONE person head coaching privileges with the box etc. Who that person is game to game is not our concern.

That was a great way to handle it. You utilized the one thing that officials sometimes forget: Common Sense!! I think the fact that you made sure everyone clearly understood what was going on is great, and is a super learning point for us inexperiences guys. Thanks for letting us in on that one.

There will always be those officials who say "the head coach is the head coach", but I firmly believe that the rule is there to make sure that one 1 coach is the one who utilizes the coaching box priviledge.

You done good!

i don't know were in the NF book it says that the referee's can prevent anyone from acting as coach. You only have to deal with one coach, and i don't care if it's the janitor, but that is the only one i am going to listen to and the assistant better not get the coach an "indirect T"



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Don