Designated starters

[Rich]

GV last night. I went over to the table with about 11 minutes left. (Captains at 12 minutes here and to the table right afterwards. May have been 11:15 or so on the clock when I walked over.) Noticed the visiting scorer was copying the official book. No biggy, I have other things to do.

So I chatted with the timer (the BV coach and a fine baseball umpire), took a bunch of air out of the basketball (it bounced up to my neck when I dropped it), and checked the possession arrows, etc. I also found out that a good sportsmanship report I sent after a previous game was read and appreciated by all -- I didn't even know it had been published.

With about 7 minutes on the clock, I finally got the official book and immediately noticed that the starters weren't marked. Actually, there were numbers next to the players and I thought that the ones marked "1" were the starters, so I asked the timer (as a coach, I figured he'd set me straight). He immediately called over the GV coach and brusquely told him that he needed to designate his starters. Whoops. The coach went down the list and picked five players as if he really didn't know who he was starting. Maybe he was just looking for the names in the book.

In the meantime, I signed the other book (the visiting scorer was nowhere to be found) and I had the timer enter the scorers in that book as well. I passed on assessing the technical foul, mainly because I would've had that fixed at 11 minutes had the book not been in the hands of the visiting scorer.

So, question for the group: Would it be better at 11 minutes to say to the visiting scorer -- "I need the official book for a minute and I'll give it right back to you" or simply do what I did? This little voice inside my head says I should've taken the book at 11 minutes just in case the visiting coach/scorer had made a big deal about this. As it was, we had no problems and the game was as you would expect between 4-7 and 0-10 teams (a 33-28 final that was 22-17 after 3 quarters).