Coaches say the darndest thing

[Scrapper1]

Originally Posted by Jurassic Referee

Personally, I don't tune them out. I put a stop to their complaining.

I had an interesting experience last week in a college game. Home coach had been chirping and whining in the first half, but nothing egregious. Then at halftime, he was waiting outside our locker to "talk" to us on the way back up to the game. I said nothing and let my more experienced partner "handle" the coach.

Then early in the second half, he said something dumb and I replied, "Coach, I'm just not going to listen to that. That's enough." Smooth sailing for a while.

Six minutes left at the end of a time-out, he comes to me and says, "Hey, is handchecking legal now? They're doing it every possession. Can we do it, too?"

Not T-worthy in my book, so I decided to go with -- the "tune out". The rest of the conversation went like this:

"So it's legal, then? What, you're not going to answer me now? You're just going to ignore me? You can't even look at me?"

He didn't say another word to me all game, except to correctly point out blood on one of his players.

In this particular case, getting tuned out actually put a stop to the behavior. I have him again next Saturday, btw. Should be fun.