I was actually thinking the same thing, you've caught up to them, work hard, and that hard work will be acknowledged and pay off in the end. While they are still working that same level, you will move past them.

The only piece of advice I can give is that there ARE people who call too many fouls. The place I normally see this is during the JV game before mine, where there's a whistle ever 20-30 seconds and the game starts at 5:50PM and is still going (even with 7-minute quarters) at 7:20PM, pushing my game's start time back. I've seen both teams in the double bonus in the third quarter for no good reason. To those officials, contact equals foul, and they will never move from those games. With no real associations (the state doesn't require membership and the games aren't assigned from them anyway), the local guys hired to work JV are usually happy to stay there and it shows.

I'm not saying you are doing this and, yes, we do brag when we have games with only 18 fouls. It means we had a game with little fouling, though, not a game where we ignored everything just to get off the court.

So I would step back and make sure that you do, indeed, have a patient whistle and are judging foul/no foul decisions based on advantage/disadvantage (up to a certain point, at least). I do know there are some games where we called <30 fouls in a game where some of these JV crews would've called well over 40. Let's just say our version of reality is, IMO, better than theirs.

But hey, I've worked with these kind of guys, too. You can see in your peripheral someone getting hammered with no call. It could be poor judgment, poor positioning, or what you said -- a desire to just get it over with and get out. Don't reach, though. It will do you no good in the short or long term. It will get you into bad habits when you finally do get to work with better officials.

Nice post Rich. You can be a great official with bad game management skills. I think that is half the game. If a team is losing by thirty points, you should not ride them with petty whistles. The bus is already running and they just want the massacre to end.