Help from the Crowd

[BillyMac]

Way back, when I was a subvarsity official, and when I was married, my wife used to go with me to Saturday night games, and we would go out to dinner after the game.

One night, while working the junior varsity game, I look up into the crowd to see her sitting with one of the varsity coaches. This is the same coach, who the previous week, had coached his junior varsity team, in a game that I had worked, due to the illness of his junior varsity coach. This is one of the real "old school" coaches, coaching soccer, basketball, and baseball, at his school, being very successful, like state championship successful, in all three sports, and was very experienced at "working" officials. This was back when we had the "seatbelt rule", and I had to sternly remind him several times to take his seat, something that he wasn't used to from some of our more timid varsity officials.

All throughout the game, I was worried about what my wife might say to this coach, because I had already told her that one of the varsity coaches at the site was a "real piece of work". In any case, after my game I asked her about what she and "Coach" were discussing. She told me that the coach had been very complimentary of my work, that it took a lot of guts to "sit him down" in my game the previous week, and that he was looking forward to me moving up to the varsity list and to have me work his varsity games.