coaches "working" officials

[bebanovich]

I am a coach who is always reevaluating my philosophy on interacting with officials during games and I would like input from thoughtful refs. When I got back into coaching a couple of years ago after a long layoff, I decided that I was going to put all of my game energy into coaching the bench and was not going to say anything to officials during the games (except when necessary for a clarification or conference, etc).

Without going into too much detail, my biased but considered opinion is that by the end of my first game back I really did my team a disservice and allowed the opposing coach to clearly gain an edge in terms of how the game was officiated (by a relatively young crew) in this case. After that game, I decided that I couldn't just say nothing and needed another plan.

In our league, we mostly use a particular organization and I found myself working for more calls (with self-imposed limits that I can go into if anyone is interested), with mixed results - never really feeling good about this but at least feeling like everything was evening-out in the end. Anyway, I kept hammering away the same way every game until our tournament when officials from a different organization were brought in. At the end of the first quarter, one of the officials came over and pointed out that a call I was demanding on our opponent was really going to hurt my team and our style if he started to mete it out how I wanted it it at both ends. The only other thing I said to officials all night was a quip to the same ref as he ran by and it ended up being a tournament win for us.

Since then I am much more selective about the types of calls being made and the crew before I open my mouth. My question is - is the pressure/chatter from coaches a necessary evil in this equation? I'm sure there must be some temptation to just mandate that they all sit down and shut-up except to coach the kids. But there must also be times where a coach says something that rings true to you and might legimately influence the flow of the game and the calls, or even just one call or situation.

I am sure you have seen colleagues who are more vulnerable to an angry or smooth-talking coach than others. I have run across one official who gave a T to a coach who asked for a clarification on the type of contact involved in a foul - thankfully it wasn't me. How much a part of the game is the coach's interaction with officials and is it OK that it is any part of the game? Is it a positive factor as long as you can control them well?