Illegal Substitution

[zebraman]

Originally Posted by johnnyrao

We had a long discussion on this at our last association meeting. A1 is at the line shooting free throws. B1 comes to the table to report and comes out on the court without being beckoned by the official. In this case the T (three person mechanics) is responsible for beckoning (IAW our state manual) and is right by the table. He did not see the player coming to the table so could not stop him. Anyway, Coach of A starts telling the T he MUST call a technical for an illegal substitution. The T, new to our association but not as an official, calls the T for the illegal sub. Many of our officials did not agree that this was the correct call. Many of our veterans said that we must enforce good game management and not let this happen. Also, if it happens we should not call a T just because a coach tells us to. Most thought he was testing an official new to the area. Options discussed were to just ignore the coach and tell B2 to get back to the table, blame it on the clock operator or scorekkeper and tell the sub to come back, just tell the coach no T and fix the problem or go and talk to the C (about anything at all) and then come back and tell the coach the C beckoned him in so it is legal. What does folks here say? I am in agreement with our veterans that we should do all we can to avoid these kinds of situations but once it happens and the coach clearly is correct in telling you how to interperet the ruling, what do you do? This was in a close game and the T did change the flow of the game.

I guess my first question is how did a sub come into the game during a free throw without any of the crew of 3 noticing it? I always have a hard time justifying a penalty to a player or a team when an entire crew falls asleep (though sometimes a crew has no choice like when they allow 6 players to be in the game for one team and the ball becomes live).

In this case, if the free thrower didn't already have the ball, I would just make the kid go back and report in.

If the free thrower already had the ball, then it might be a situation where we don't have a choice.