Lucked into a Varsity Boys' Game

[A Pennsylvania Coach]

I'm in my fourth year, and got my first varsity girls' game this year, in a tip-off tournament. The rest of my schedule is JV-B. We had a snowstorm Tuesday night, and it was forecasted in advance so many schools cancelled JV games and moved up varsity games to 6:30 (normally 8:00). That's what happened to my JV game, which was scheduled for after the JH JV and JH C (aka 7th grade) games I had at 4 & 5. One of the varsity guys was there as my partner, and the other was ~20 miles away for afternoon games.

Since the guy traveling was cutting it close, I stuck around for the varsity game. I went out at the 15-minute mark and we prepared in case he didn't show. The AD came over and suggested that since I was staying anyway, we could just do three-man when the other varsity guy showed up. My partner was good with that. The other guy arrived at about the four-minute mark and he liked the idea too, so we did three-man.

I've done some three-man in scrimmages so I wasn't too uncomfortable with that. One team was playing a zone, so the opponents were changing sides with the ball quite a bit, and it took me a bit to figure out when to crossover as the lead. I didn't know where to stand on the timeouts but my partners helped me with that. I had a couple double whistles--one for OOB on "my" sideline when I was the lead, and another for a player-control foul in the lane, but the drive was from the C's side and the contact was in the middle so he took it. Fortunately I held my signals in both cases and deferred.

I got good feedback from my partners throughout the game and felt like I had a good one. It was close for two quarters, but the visitors scored 28 in the third and ended up winning by 25 or so. Late in the third, I called a player-control foul against the visitors. The coach didn't like the call at all, but I'm pretty sure I got it. The defender was moving laterally and then had to hop in front of the ball-handler, but the contact came after the defender had re-established and before the ball-handler left the ground to shoot. Coming out of the break between quarters I took a few seconds to ask the coach what he saw on that play and we had a good quick back-and-forth about what we each saw. The next time down the court he told me that he appreciated me asking him, which was nice. I've been working on interacting with the coaches a bit more when appropriate and that felt like a good one.

When the game ended I was on a high that I'm still coming off of!