Help from the Crowd
 

In an 8th grade game the other night I call 4-5 fouls on the home team and none on the visitors. HC is all over me for that and wants to know why I'm doing that. Before I can even respond a fan behind the bench says "maybe our boys should stop fouling them, coach"

Later in the game coach is yelling again for a whistle, I tell him knock it off or he'll get the whistle, same fan, "(coach) will you just shut up and try and win the game!"

Made that game easier, coach kind of gave up after that.

Same coach ran the table on the second game, he apologized said he got a bit excited because he won the other night and wanted to win again that night but his team apparently isn't that good.

Good thing he wasn't coaching the 7th grade team, they were down 13-1 at the end of the 1st quarter and lost by 42.

How would you have responded to the coach had you had the opportunity?

So then they improved after the 1st quarter. :D

Ooh ooh! I know!

I've been wondering what JR has been doing with himself lately...

Jurrasic had to be the FAN!:D

Since I had already told him to knock it off once, my response would have been

Tweet
Technical foul , white, head coach

And then go home and write the report.

It's my first year doing basketball, my 20th year officiating overall so I'm not unfamiliar with being worked and fixing other's behavior.

Yeah, I guess. :)

You have to write a report for EVERY technical foul you call?

Yes, our association requires it. Just a brief narrative about the events leading up to to the call and the resulting compliance/noncompliance.

State requirement here.

Me too! Where's JR these days?

We have an webpage for that. You just fill in the fields (team name, player/coach name, time, location, etc.) and a brief description of the reason.

Our soccer board also has one for red/yellow cards, and as a bonus, someone prints out a spreadsheet at season's end of all the cards we issued, including the reasons. (It doesn't list who issued them.) It makes for a fun conversation piece!

Hopefully He'll Be Around Soon ...
 

Sabbatical.

Do You Also Ride to the Game Together?
 

Do you pay for your wife to get into the game, or does she buy her own ticket?

:) Not her in this instance. Would she do that? Absolutely. This person was not known to me.

I think Freddy was indicating that this would be a "good" line to say to the coach (i.e., implying that the fan was the coach's wife).

Really? Your wife would yell at the coach in the game you are officiating?

LOL...I tell my wife (the few times she goes) to ignore all the screamers. Although, just last week her friend went with her...and she told me her friend yelled at a fan that was yelling at us.

The fan shut his mouth.

You're the man. I can't get my own wife to come see any of my games, let alone her friends.

I'm pretty lucky in that my wife loves going to both my basketball and football games. She hides from the fans though because they drive her nuts too.

Saw a different take on this last night. V Girls game...home team fan is going off on officials about one thing after another. Small crowd, so he is heard by everyone in the gym. About the 4th time he starts hollering, the home Coach jumps up and turns to the stands and tells the guy to either knock it off or pack up and leave. Guy sputters for a few seconds, and then the home point guard says 'Dad, just leave. Please? You are embarrassing us."

Guy got up and left the gym. Rest of the home fans started clapping and cheering for the point guard.

Made me feel all warm inside! :p

My wife will go to my games and sit and watch. Since she'll never react to any of the plays someone will ask who her son or daughter is and she'll say it's the umpire/referee and they usually stop any comments or anything.

Baseball game last year when one team was in red the other in white someone asked her who her son was, she said oh, #18 in blue. Took the fan a moment to figure it out and then they said oh, never mind and got up and left.

My girlfriend has been to a couple of my basketball games so far this year. She also went to one of my football games.

At the football game, she ended up sitting in the same area as most of the home team's parents. Eventually, they asked her which player out there was her son. Her response: "My son isn't out there... my boyfriend is." I'm told there were a few odd looks before she clarified that I was the one wearing the stripes.

Scary Moment ...
 

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.

Time to Count Sheep Again . . .
 

And then BillyMac woke up, the smile on his pillow-creased face fading with the newly rising dawn of the day. It was time to make the coffee and get to work. :D

Next dream installment: "The cheerleaders keep gawking at me even to this day . . ."

He was working you through your wife before you even got his games. :p

He was clearly very good at working officials to start that early.

Not Single, Hot, Not A Mom ...
 

You're right. I made this up. What really happened is that he tried to hit on my wife, I climbed up into the bleachers, and beat the bejesus out of him. Yeah. That's right. That's what really happened.