"Someone's gonna get hurt out there"

[robertclasalle]

Here's what happens a lot and how I recently handled it. Very rough freshmen boys game, my partner and I had over 20 fouls by middle of the 2nd quarter and the game was not cleaning up. As I am moving past one of the coaches as the ball went in transition, he said to me "You know, someone's gonna get hurt out there." The ball was doing nothing so I blew my whistle and stopped play, called my partner over, conferenced with both coaches and asked him what he meant by that. He said you guys are not calling anything and it's getting rough. I said "Coach, we got 20-something fouls, both teams are in double bonus, and if the game's not cleaning up, that's coaching, not officiating." I then asked him if he wanted to pull his players off the court rather than risk injury to his players, as he feared. Guess what, he said no, let's keep playing.

I'm sorry, friends, but I can't stand that kind of attempt to place the blame on the officials in case something happens. God forbid some kid did get hurt, break a finger or worse, and you know the first thing that would be said is, "Well, we told the refs this was going to happen and they didn't do anything about it." When parents say it, I ignore it because that's just parental ignorance, but I'm not letting some coach set me up for a law suit in those circumstances. I don't handle personal injury claims anymore because now I am a personal injury arbitrator, but agree with me or not, I've seen what happens. Even if you eventually win the case, you just went through 2-4 years of litigation, sleepless nights, aggravation, time, money, etc. And you heard this from a lawyer.