Football to Basketball Transition

[jTheUmp]

I also started in football, and took up basketball after a few years of doing football exclusively.

The main differences:
Football officials are taught to stay stationary as much as possible, to let the play develop in front of them. Basketball officials are taught to be moving almost continuously, a-la "move to improve".

Football officiating emphasizes slow whistles (spit your whistle out after the snap), and that there's no such thing as a "late flag". In basketball, if you don't whistle that traveling violation or foul within a half-second of it's occurrence, and you're probably going to have to let it go. Accordingly, your whistle is in your mouth almost all the time.



Some things do cross over from football to basketball: dealing with coaches, professional appearance, court/field presence, etc.

On the specifics of dealing with bad coach behavior, I think a lot of the difference has to do with the environment. In football, you're outdoors, 50% of the time the coach isn't going to be right next to you (due to the sideline restrictions), one coach is always going to be on the other side of the field, over 50 yards away, and spectators are well away from the playing area. So it's a lot easier to "not hear" and "ignore" some of the whining/complaining/antics.

In basketball, both coaches are within 50 feet of you almost all game long, you're in an enclosed confines of a gymnasium, and spectators might be as close as 3 feet from the playing area. So there's a lot more coach-official and official-spectator interaction. More potential interaction = less leeway bad behavior.

YMMV, of course.