Coaching Non Sequiturs from the Weekend

[Mark Padgett]

Two years ago I had a girls MS rec coach ask me before a game if he had to call his girls by their "real" names? I had no idea what he was talking about. He told me he had three girls on the team with the same first name and he used other names to call two of them so they didn't get confused. I told him I didn't care what he called them as long as it wasn't obscene. He said he was just checking to make sure it was OK because he didn't want a technical.

When I told my partner he said that was the strangest thing he'd ever heard a coach ask in his 15 years of officiating.

It reminded me of a girls MS game a long time ago in which one team had a set of identical twins. One was really good but the other wasn't. The opposing coach told us before the game to watch them really close if the "good one" fouled out because he had heard that their coach would have them change jerseys so the "good one" could stay in the game. That was the strangest thing I'd ever heard from a coach up to that point in my career.