Wow!

[Stanley]

I'm 15 years old and work elementary basketball. Sometimes I have to work them by myself....sometimes I wish I was by myself. I was working a game the other night with a boy a year or two younger than I. Blue team is down by one with :30 left to play. Blue gets a rebound and sends a full court pass to a cherry picker underneath the basket. The pass is high it hits the kid's finger tips, hit's the floor and is about to go OOB when my partner reaches out, and taps the ball back to the kid who scores the bucket and wins the game by 1 point. Could not believe it!!! At first I didn't...but then I thought, "we can't have that, I should wipe it off.....but no i can't do that because the ref is part of the floor but....no that can't count..." but by the time i finally came to this conclusion it was 10 or 15 seconds later and I sure wasn't going to do anything about it then...although because it was so obvious i may have been able to sell it. So what would you do if your partner did this in a jr.high game or a jv contest? The ball is alive...ref is part of the floor....??? What would you do?

Thankfully the two coaches were good buddies and both laughed but the fans didn't find it as amusing! And neither did I!

[Josh Ovens]

i think you did the right thing in this situation. i myself started officiating when i was 14. im 18 now, and coming to the conclusion of my 2nd year with a license. you will realize sometimes things will happen regardless of who you work with, but ive never seen anything like that happen before. even if your partner was out of bounds and it struck him, the ball would be Out of bounds. but you said he clearly knocked it in. i think in some situations its okay to let your partner "live or die" with a situation, but if you CLEARLY saw it, it was the best thing the correct this. but if you knew he tipped it back in, you shouldve blown it right away. it looks really awkward calling it as late as you did. but obviously, next time you will be on top of things if it happens again. and granted you are starting out when you are young so you can rack up the experience. but bottom line, hopefully you dont have to work with this guy again.!~ all i can say to you is, thumbs up!good work.!

[daves]

If the official was standing out of bounds when he touched the ball, I would have immediately blown my whistle. After the game I would have a serious talk about what he did. Maybe what you perceived as an intentional act was unintentional.

[Mark T. DeNucci, Sr.]

I am sure that all of us have had a player pass a live ball directly to you thinking that you were a teammate. I have had it happen to me at least a couple times a season. Thank goodness, I have never went brain dead and caught the ball.

But if the official did catch the ball, how should he handle it. We will dispense with the official touching out-of-bounds scenario, because the player who threw the ball caused it to go out-of-bounds. So the only other scenario is if the official is completely inbounds.

As we all know the official is part of the court that he is touching. I think that the official (who caught the pass) could make a good case for treating the situation as if the ball had become lodged between the flange of the basket and the backboard. Meaning the officials would go to the alternating possession arrow.

Lets apply this logic to the play in the original posting. If the Lead official in this play (assuming that he was completely inbounds) made a conscious decision to keep the ball from going out-of-bounds by tapping the ball to the offensive player. Then the Trail official could make a good case applying the situation which I described in the previous paragraph. I think that it is the only logical way to handle the situation.

[Talkinhoopsy'all]

Interesting set of circumstances, from your description it looks as it were an intentional act, if that were the case I would as stated earlier have a serious chat with my partner since what he/she does on the floor makes the entire crew guilty.

If it was unintentional (as in a knee jerk reaction) a chat still would be good but more to the tune of court awareness and positioning on the floor, chances are this can happen again and the situation or stakes might be higher. Either way it is a learing experience for you and your partner.

Of course my first encounter with a ball happened during a JV game, the ball was thrown the length of the court on a fast break and being in the right place at the wrong time, the overthrown ball was tipped off my eye to the player who laid it in. My eye was as large as the ball or so it seems but the big laugh came when the coach of the official assisted hoop said "I hope it didn't hit your good eye".

I think about it now and it is humorous, but you try and find a pair of sunglasses large enough to cover a grapefruit, they don't exist.

Needless to say I have managed to stay out of the way since then.



Good luck

[RX Ref]

in this situation, I don't think I would have to tell my partner a thing. The fans and coaches would let him have it first, and he would never do it again.

[daves]

Originally posted by Mark T. DeNucci, Sr.
I am sure that all of us have had a player pass a live ball directly to you thinking that you were a teammate. I have had it happen to me at least a couple times a season. Thank goodness, I have never went brain dead and caught the ball.

But if the official did catch the ball, how should he handle it. We will dispense with the official touching out-of-bounds scenario, because the player who threw the ball caused it to go out-of-bounds. So the only other scenario is if the official is completely inbounds.

As we all know the official is part of the court that he is touching. I think that the official (who caught the pass) could make a good case for treating the situation as if the ball had become lodged between the flange of the basket and the backboard. Meaning the officials would go to the alternating possession arrow.

Lets apply this logic to the play in the original posting. If the Lead official in this play (assuming that he was completely inbounds) made a conscious decision to keep the ball from going out-of-bounds by tapping the ball to the offensive player. Then the Trail official could make a good case applying the situation which I described in the previous paragraph. I think that it is the only logical way to handle the situation.

Sounds like an interesting way to handle it. What rule would you use for this? Would it be the elasticity clause? I don't have my rule book handy so I don't know the exact wording. Doesn't it give the referee authority to make a call if it's not covered in the rules? What if the lead in this play were the referee? I would hope they had better judgment than to do this but the trail would have no recourse in this situation. If I were an official and caught a pass reflexively, I would drop the ball where I stood and not blow my whistle.

[Mark T. DeNucci, Sr.]

Originally posted by daves

Sounds like an interesting way to handle it. What rule would you use for this? Would it be the elasticity clause? I don't have my rule book handy so I don't know the exact wording. Doesn't it give the referee authority to make a call if it's not covered in the rules? What if the lead in this play were the referee? I would hope they had better judgment than to do this but the trail would have no recourse in this situation. If I were an official and caught a pass reflexively, I would drop the ball where I stood and not blow my whistle.

I apologize for not getting back to this thread for awhile. I would invoke the elastic clasue to cover my tuckus. If you catch a pass because of reflexes, I still think that you have to stop the game. I can assure you the the moment you catch the ball every player is going to stop and and wonder what to do. Their are expecting to hear a whistle and it should be your whistle sounding very quickly.