Inexperienced Partner

[actuary77]

I had a "not so good" (to put it lightly) experience yesterday at a Sophomore Boys shootout. This is my 5th year officiating HS ball. I found myself in unfamiliar territory as my partner has only been officiating basketball for 3 yrs. So I was all of a sudden the "experienced" one.

My partner was a much older gentleman (I'm 30) and has been officiating football for 10 yrs. He definitely had the attributes of an official (assertive, confident, etc., nice guy too) but his basketball officiating skills were sub par. Just a few things:

• He would signal a foul with an open hand. During the first time out, I advised him to use a closed fist when signaling fouls... he never did. I was not being nitpicky here but everytime he would blow his whistle, I wouldn't know what he called and whether to switch or not and where I should go.
• I saw him a lot of times "ball watching" when he was L and the ball was above the 3-pt line on top. It was a concern bec no one was watching the other players off ball in what turned out to be a very physical game.
• There were a bunch of plays when we had dual coverage on rebounding/shooting plays when he called fouls on defenders who had legal position and just stood there (offense initiated contact), blocks that were clean (he acknowledged to me during timouts that he did miss some of those) and in more than one instance, call 3-seconds after the coach just screamed "3-seconds!!!"
• He would change sides as L and never went back as we went the other way. So there were times we were on the same side of the floor. Obviously, I couldn't as T change sides in the middle of the play.
• Whistle baseline OOB when he's the Trail and OOB on the sideline that's not his

I definitely am far from the most perfect basketball official out there and I know I still have a lot to learn. But I definitely had a bad game, partly (or primarily?) because of him. It was further aggravated by very vocal coaches and players using their hands to defend all the time. (I think we called like 40 fouls total) It was just very disappointing bec I just had a good pair of games that morning when the coaches, AD and even some parents came up to us (obv diff partner) praising us for a job well done.

This game definitely lived up to the cliche that "you're only as good as your partner is". I was just wondering how you would have handled a situation like this.