Language at the spot of the foul.

[Back In The Saddle]

Look at it like this, the whole purpose of signaling and vocalizing is communication. 98% of the time the foul is obvious. So what are you actually communicating? Nothing that the players, coaches, fans don't already know.

The exceptions I listed:

• Block/charge, this is one time when you want to sell it, baby, sell it.
• Bad screen. This one is not obvious. Don't give everybody a chance to start wondering what happened.
• Hand check, again not always obvious what the foul is here.
• "Body!", one I forgot in my earlier post. On a drive to the basket, when everybody see's no contact "up top," I use this one to communicate that the contact was with the shooter's body.

One risk of "over communicating" is that everybody has an opinion on every call. If your prelim doesn't match their perception, you risk losing credibility. If the coach sees "hit" and you call "push", you've created a perception problem, even though you got the call right.

My philosophy, be a man of few words. And choose wisely when to use those words.

Just my $0.02.