What would you do?

[Nevadaref]

Originally Posted by elker13

I'm working a Girls Varsity game at a small High School. I arrive with my partner and we are informed by both coaches that a player on the visiting team forgot her uniform. The home coach offers a JV uniform to the visiting team(Why they didn't pack a spare I don't know).

We inform the visiting coach that the game will start with a technical foul, he loses his coaches box, and if he gets another technical foul he is gone. He says he completely understands.

Game is going smoothly up until the last 3 minutes of the 4th quarter...Visiting coach calls a timeout, I ask if he wants a Full or 30. From the lipping reading I see 30. I report to the table and take my position and notice the visiting team is seated on the bench for the timeout.

I walk over and say Coach it's a 30, off the bench please. He becomes irate and screams I called a Full Timeout. I calmly say ok and tell him that this is his warning, anything else will be a technical. I then return to the table and report the Full time out. The 1st horn sounds and I go to the bench to inform them. I ask the coach to give a physical signal in the future for timeouts to avoid confusion.

He stands up and yells are you going to keep interupting my timeout, I only have one minute. He proceeds to tell me that I'm an awful official and I don't know what I'm doing. I took a step back ready to whack him and my partner stepped in between us.

Do you whack him or do you let him go?

A. If the girl who is wearing the borrowed uniform doesn't start, then you should have waited until she entered the game to assess the technical foul for the illegal uniform. There's nothing wrong until she participates.

B. You learned why it is important to have clear communication about 30s and Fulls. You were correct to ask the team to stand since your understanding was that it was a 30. You even gave the coach somewhat of a break by changing the type of time-out for them.

C. As others have written, you probably should have waited until the time-out was completely over, and the players were back on the floor to ask the coach to be as clear as possible in the future about what type of time-out that he wanted.

Overall, a good learning situation. I'm sure that you will handle something like this even better in the future.