Ugly game questions

[Andy]

To me, the title of your post says it all....ugly!

My experience has been that it is difficult for the officials to look pretty in an ugly game. It's almost impossible to make an ugly game pretty.

From your post, it sounds to me that you did just about all you could...you and your crew kept officiating the game, kept calling fouls, and stayed on top of the "action" to prevent anything from getting out of hand. These games have no "flow" because you are constantly having to blow the whistle. As you stated, it's pretty obvious why you are blowing the whistle.

Move on...it sounds like you handled the game just fine. Hope your next one is better.

[Rufus]

My partner and I had a very similar situation in a boy's JV game. Very ugly. At half-time the varsity guys were giving us some pointers on handling this type of game. The one that stuck out the most was to talk to the players during a dead ball/free throw. Something like "C'mon now, you all can play better defense than this. Let's try and clean it up." We used it in the 2nd half and things did clean up a bit, but it was probably coincidence.

This advice strays into coaching vs. officiating realm, but as long as it's said to both teams in a non-threatening way that doesn't imply "and if you don't clean it up, we're going to..." I think it's worth trying. This doesn't relieve the officials of calling what they see, just as you said you did, but is another thing to try and get them to play a little cleaner.

[Chess Ref]

Originally Posted by Rufus

My partner and I had a very similar situation in a boy's JV game. Very ugly. At half-time the varsity guys were giving us some pointers on handling this type of game. The one that stuck out the most was to talk to the players during a dead ball/free throw. Something like "C'mon now, you all can play better defense than this. Let's try and clean it up." We used it in the 2nd half and things did clean up a bit, but it was probably coincidence.

This advice strays into coaching vs. officiating realm, but as long as it's said to both teams in a non-threatening way that doesn't imply "and if you don't clean it up, we're going to..." I think it's worth trying. This doesn't relieve the officials of calling what they see, just as you said you did, but is another thing to try and get them to play a little cleaner.

the whole talking thing doesn't seem to be my style. The following is an example of how my talkin to them has gone.

Ref : Let's try and take this to the end cleanly.
Player Hears : He thinks I'm dirty
Coach: Why are you telling my players they're playing dirty


Assignor Calls: what did you say to players ?

Yada, Yada, yada.

Player has a question I probably have an answer. But I getting further and further away from sharing my insights on the state of our game with them.