Ugly game questions
 

We had an ugly girls varsity game over the weekend. Home team is 0-6, visitors are 6-0. We talk in pregame about staying on top of the game, getting the obvious fouls not to expect a blowout (because you never know for sure what's going to happen).

In the first minute of the game, I pass on a shaky illegal screen (there's a little contact, but the defender gets through it without losing her "man"). Coach says to call it. (In hindsight, he's correct and next time I will definitely call it). As the game progresses, the home team (0-6) is staying in the game and actually takes the lead just before halftime. It's a physical game and we were in the double bonus mid way through the 2nd period. All told, we probably had close to 30 fouls. The trend is that the home team's fouls are mostly "bad" fouls, such as pushing, obvious player controls, hip checks, etc.

We talk at halftime and decide we need to call everything as we don't really have the luxury of passing on much. Home team's fouls are too hard and ugly to pass on and the visitor's are going to get frustrated as long as they're struggling to pull ahead. I think the visitors came into the game expecting to win by a large margin. They're not playing well and they're going to get more frustrated as long as the game remains close.

The visitors pull ahead by 4-5 points in the third period. We call a ton of fouls (both ways) in an effort to keep the game in check. Neither coach has much to say (most of the calls are so obvious, what can they say?). Let me say that a lot of the fouls by the visitors are pretty obvious, too (I don't want to give the impression that the visitors are playing a pristine game, they've got a couple "goons" on their team, too).

In the fourth period, the visitors open up a 12 point lead and are not threatened the rest of the way. However, the home team continues to hammer and hack. We call foul after foul after foul. Three players for the home team foul out (not a word from the coach). None of the fouls are so bad you could call them flagrant or intentional. We did call a technical for an obvious case of disconcertion (defender continued to put her hand in front of the face of an offensive player on a throw in after we told her to stop it). I explained the call to the coach and again, he said very little ("I didn't know they couldn't do that" was all he said).

Before we can get this debacle finished and get off the floor, we have a held ball (about the 6th one of the second half). As they continue to tussle for the ball (after the whistle has blown 2-3 times and we're moving towards the players) the visitor's girl relaxes her grip and in doing so, she gets thrown to the floor by the home team player. Visiting coach wants a foul called. What can you call? We kept telling the girls to stop on the whistle, but neither team would do it. The home player was a much larger girl who held on just a bit longer than the smaller visitor. She wasn't hurt, but it did look ugly. There was no taunting or anything like that. None of us had anything. We awarded the ball on the alternating possession and the game ended with no more problems.

In the officials room after the game, all three of us are not happy with the game. I understand that we're all going to have games like this from time to time. We don't play, our job is to officiate the game we get to the best of our abilities. That being said, what else can you do to "control" a game like this? My thought is to more quickly identify your problem players and be sure my partners know who they are so we can get them off the floor as soon as possible. As it turned out, our problem players (all on the home team) all fouled out, but perhaps we could have gotten rid of them sooner? My first no-call (illegal screen I mentioned) could have been the first foul on one of the problem players (of course I didn't know that in the first minute of the game).

Your thoughts on handling a game that is certainly not "chicken salad", but instead is "chicken s..t"?

1. T is for faceguarding, not disconcertion. Hope that you judged it correctly. It has to be hands near the eyes, not just a hand in the face.

2. Continuing action after the whistle is going to be a judgment call. I'll trust that you and your partners handled the situation appropriately.

3. Identifying problem players is good game management. However, it is not your task to "get them off the floor ASAP." That makes it sound as if you are targeting them and making an effort to DQ them instead of just keeping a watchful eye on these players and penalizing any wrongdoing. Your task should be to make it known that their play is being observed and hopefully this will get them to clean up their acts. If not, then you penalize them until they remove themselves from the contest.

I don't see any hint of anything you could have done better. Some games are just that way.

1. T is for faceguarding, not disconcertion. Hope that you judged it correctly. It has to be hands near the eyes, not just a hand in the face.
Her hand was 3 inches in front of her eyes/face waving back and forth. It was pretty obvious!

2. Continuing action after the whistle is going to be a judgment call. I'll trust that you and your partners handled the situation appropriately.


3. Identifying problem players is good game management. However, it is not your task to "get them off the floor ASAP." That makes it sound as if you are targeting them and making an effort to DQ them instead of just keeping a watchful eye on these players and penalizing any wrongdoing. Your task should be to make it known that their play is being observed and hopefully this will get them to clean up their acts. If not, then you penalize them until they remove themselves from the contest.
Bad wording on my part. The idea is to identify these players to our partners so we all know who they are. We're not trying to get them out of the game if they don't deserve it by making stuff up, just making sure we do get anything and everything they do as long as they continue to be a problem on the floor.

Did you also record a warning in the book for breaking the plane??? :D

You're assuming the thrower wasn't standing within three inches of the line. :)

Girl goons. Cool! :p

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.

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.

You are assuming that the offense was committed against the thrower. All the OP said was that it was during a throw-in. It could have been someone faceguarding another player inbounds who was trying to receive the pass. He didn't specify the involved players.

That is why I purposely didn't comment on breaking the boundary plane.

You can put lipstick on a pig, but you'll never get the desired result.

You are assuming that the offense was committed against the thrower. All the OP said was that it was during a throw-in. It could have been someone faceguarding another player inbounds who was trying to receive the pass. He didn't specify the involved players.

The player who was "faceguarded" was in bounds, facing the end line. The defensive player was between her and the player in bounding the ball. Like I said, she waved her hand about 3 inches in front of her eyes.

One of my partners is trying to get a copy of the game tape for the crew to view.

That'll teach that know-it-all, Snaqwells, to ASSume! ;)

(PS Just having a little fun with you, Adam, but you do deserve it.)

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.

You're ASSuming you know what result I desire!

Had a similar game recently. I was in "survival mode" half way through the first quarter. Girls Varsity two teams with not much skill playing aggressively. Without a doubt a tough game to work. You're not going to look good working such a game. Call what needs to be called and do your best to keep the clock running.

You want the pig with an apple in its mouth?

One time I had a rough boy's game like the above example. While lining up for a free throw, I said to all the players, "Most of you guys play football too, don't you?"

A few of them said that they did.

I just said, "Yeah, I can tell ! You do know football season is over, right?" It got a laugh from the players and the game actually got a little better.