Kevin Ware
 

Anyone who saw the Louisville/Duke game saw the gruesome injury and the emotion from both teams and coaches. To all you veterans I'm just curious how, as an official, you keep emotion out of calling a fair game?

What's a "fair game"? What other type of game do we officiate?

"Emotion" and "fair game" are not opposites. You can feel for the injured player while not having it affect the calls you make.

I know what you are asking. It's called concentration and focus. The ability to clear your mind of distraction and deal with the task at hand.

Lets take "fair game" out of my question. How do you keep your emotions under control to call the best game possible?

Discipline. Fundamentals. Self-talk. Concentration.

It the same things we have to do to block out personal distractions from our own lives.

Experience.

It's the same thing we (try to) do every call -- focus on the next one.

Dealing with a player injury is a lot easier than dealing with an emotional T, or concentrating after we think we might have missed a call, etc.

That would be a tough situation. I have never had the experience of calling a game in which a player suffered a serious injury that required a delay to remove an injured player from the floor by EMS. The worst injury situation I had in BBall was a rec league game were a player torn his Achilles Tendon on a drive to the basket. He was swearing at me and my partner that someone stepped on his heal during the drive, but he was never touched, it just went.

We didn't have the heart to call a T on him even though a normal situation would have warranted a T being called for his behavior. He finally calmed down on the bench when one of the fans showed him a video of the play where he saw he wasn't touched, he just called us over and apologized to us for his behavior because he was wrong about what happened. That was right before EMS arrived to take him to UofM hospital. He had hopped over to the bench after he was hurt and then the team decided to call EMS because they weren't sure how to get him to the hospital.

I did have a friend who was officiating a HS Volleyball match. A young lady came down wrong and blew her knee badly. It was a dislocated knee with ACL, MCL, and PCL tears. They ended up having to move the match to an adjacent court because of the delay in treating her. I wasn't there for that event, but I did know the young lady who was injured. She was a great track athlete as well and it cost her a senior year track season as she recovered.

A critical skill for all officials is to seperate the past from the task at hand. Whether it's a history with a coach, a blown call in the last quarter, or a gruesome injury...you have got to learn to focus on the play in front of you at present. Every play is separate and distinct from all others. Every quarter is distinct from all others. Every game is new and distinct from the rest this season or last year.

The alternative is to let each play or experience build up and color your judgement. To do so would make it impossible to call a game fairly and objectively.

Ware's injury was horrific to watch on TV. The reactions of the coaches and players indicates it was probably far worse in person. The officials on that game had to separate the images and focus on getting it right once the game re-started. I think they did an outstanding job. They are professionals and I think everybody on this board or in their officiating circle expected them to handle it exactly as they did.

I had a friend who tore his menicus playing the front line in a volleyball game. He say he did the same thing, started cussing everyone out b/c he was positive someone had just kicked him....LOL

I do not even know what "fair" has to do with this situation. We have a job to do and we do that job regardless of what happens on the court or they will find someone else.

I do football and have seen some pretty bad injuries in my career and had games were several kids were taken off the field and in some cases just as bad as what was seen yesterday. You never want to see a young person be in that situation to be carried off on a stretcher. I always pray for their recovery and that they were not that hurt that badly and go back to doing my job.

Peace

+100


I think that everybody will agree with me that a TF, especially against a HC, can really cause your adrenaline to start pumping.

MTD, Sr.

Everyone here has given good advice. Applying it is the hard part sometimes. I think most of us can deal with college kids or even high school kids having stuff like this happen... we've seen it enough. It sucks, we feel bad for the kid, and we move on.

That said, the two times I have honestly had problem with focus after an injury involved kids. One was a 7th grade football game. Kid on one side grabbed a facemask, twirled a kid from the other team a full 270 degrees and let him fly. Kid was ejected, needless to say. But after a lengthy delay including a Life-Flight helicopter, and also including one of my crewmates throwing up, we all admitted having significant trouble focusing the rest of the game.

We never heard if anything came of that wrt the offending kid. I did the the injured kid a couple of years later and he remembered me. He had quit football but didn't seem to have any after effects.

The other one was a 10U softball game where a pitcher, maskless, took a grounder in the face. I can't even describe it, really - it was horrifying. After a 20 minute delay, we played about 2 more batters before the coach of the injured girl forfeited the game because his kids were so unfocused they were at risk themselves. Partner and I agreed we were having as much trouble focusing as those kids.

For me, I increase my Focus and Concentration during the game. I focus on each possession and concentrate on the specific situation.

I do several specific things:
1) At the beginning of each possession, I look at the game clock and verbally say the time that the possession started ("12:21"). Should there be a shot clock issue, I know when the possession started and can easily fix the problem.
2) During each time out, I do a verbal "game reset" ("UL 44 Duke 42. UL has 4 fouls Duke has 3 fouls. Both teams have 4 timeouts. Next media TO is under 12minutes").
3) In last 10:00 of game, I verbally say who has the possession arrow.
4) When the game emotion (or mine when dealing w/a player or coach) increases, I use a breathing exercise (3 seconds to breathe in, hold it for 3 seconds, exhale for 3 seconds, hold no breath for 3 seconds; then repeat process). This slows my heart rate and calms me down to see and think more clearly.

Others may have better or different methods.....

The fact they have reacted like this, that is all I need to see.

http://i.imgur.com/tsXkj3i.gif

Peace