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.

rob...how was the 2nd half? did your conference with the coaches work or did the game continue on the same course?

It cleaned up.

I've said something like this to a coach before:

Coach: Someone's gonna get hurt
Me: Then coach, take control of your kids before that happens.

We had something like this too. But talking to the coaches didn't help. So we pulled the captains aside and they asked us to talk to the players on the court. So right before the start of the 3rd quatre we pulled all 10 playes togeather in a huddle and said listen guys we pulled you over here for 2 reason. first its getting really physical and we dont want you to get hurt, 2nd your coachs are really angry and well if I were you guys I wouldnt want to see my coach tossed from the game. It cleaned up pretty well at that.

Sometimes it takes two minutes of being 'the jerk' but you do nothing but call fouls until they get the message. I know that was tried, from the sounds of it, but I'm talking every 15 seconds until they get the message. Normally, you don't see this type of play unless the teams are just plain bad.

Yes I agree I have tried this and well sometimes it seems to work, other times it makes things worse because the coach's get angry that you are calling everything now, when in their eyes you weren't calling anything before. You can never win with coaches