Questioning Partner's Call

[Adam]

Originally Posted by Afrosheen

I had a play where my partner called a backcourt violation on inbounds where I thought the player catching the ball inbounds did not establish team control in the front court before going into the backcourt. My partner was the trail official, so I went up to him and asked him whether the player established team control in the front court. He replied by saying don't make this awkward and stop questioning my call. After the quarter I told him I was not intending to make this personal, I just wanted to make sure we had the call right. He then said that how could I have seen it better as Lead when he was on top of it as Trail. Granted he is still a fairly new official, but he acts very defensively and took this personally.

A couple of days later, I get an email with a veiled question of "what do you think of the first paragraph on page 307 in the Rules by Topic?" I returned, "what about it?"

He then writes: "Could you compare and contrast our situation with another of your choice to help me better understand why what happened Saturday was as you put normal of partners to do?"


The rule he is referencing is:



Now I'm wondering how to address this. I try to instill the value of working as a crew to get the call right. But now I'm not sure how to approach this situation and any further ones where I'm wanting to confer with my partner on a call.

I'm wondering how you guys apply this rule in your games?

I'm coming back to your original post. You've seemingly got two questions here. First, how to address his email. I would simply tell him that the rule itself is interpreted to mean you cannot overrule a partner's call. It does not mean you cannot approach a partner to discuss a call. If he's not receptive to feedback, that's another issue.

As for your final question, that's what we've been addressing. With rookie partners, I may expand my area a bit, but only to make calls that need made, not to talk them out of calls.

You talk about the integrity of the game, but let me ask, what do you think hurts the integrity of the game more?

1. Allowing a marginal BC call to stand that may or may not be wrong.
2. Destroying your partner's credibility by approaching him on a borderline BC call that, for all you know, is a difference in judgment rather than a rule error.

I know now, I think, why the coach was going crazy. He saw you going to approach your partner to question the call.

[Afrosheen]

Originally Posted by MD Longhorn

Nor did I say such a thing. Reading is fundamental.

And with that I'm done.

Exactly, which is why none of your posts answered the central question of the thread.

[Afrosheen]

Originally Posted by Adam

I'm coming back to your original post. You've seemingly got two questions here. First, how to address his email. I would simply tell him that the rule itself is interpreted to mean you cannot overrule a partner's call. It does not mean you cannot approach a partner to discuss a call. If he's not receptive to feedback, that's another issue.

As for your final question, that's what we've been addressing. With rookie partners, I may expand my area a bit, but only to make calls that need made, not to talk them out of calls.

You talk about the integrity of the game, but let me ask, what do you think hurts the integrity of the game more?

1. Allowing a marginal BC call to stand that may or may not be wrong.
2. Destroying your partner's credibility by approaching him on a borderline BC call that, for all you know, is a difference in judgment rather than a rule error.

I know now, I think, why the coach was going crazy. He saw you going to approach your partner to question the call.

You're assuming a little too much with that last sentence. But regardless, I appreciate you're willingness to consider the entirety of my original post.

I agree with you that marginal stuff should not be questioned and that they're supposed to be stuff that should discussed during the half in closed quarters if at all, which is what I do.

But let me ask you, should the referees in Tom Izzo's game not have gone up to their partner on such a missed call? I don't consider that call to be marginal as it a complete kick of the rule.

[Afrosheen]

Originally Posted by JRutledge

Well you keep saying you apologized to him as if that made everything else right that you did before. That is my point to you. You were given advice as to what happened and instead of just saying "OK I can see that" or "Now I understand that point of view" you want to debate what you did as if he had no right to be upset with your initial questioning. And I said both of you handled this wrong in the long run. He could have responded initially better to you and not been as confrontational for sure. This was not all on you if you have been paying attention. Your actions just initiated the confrontation.



I do not need to say anything to fit a point of view. You seem to already know what was best, so why come here and ask at all? If you have it figured out, then do you. Once again you came here with this situation, not me.

Peace

OK I'm sorry if I misunderstood your posts. Thanks for clarifying.

Though I do not want this to mean that approaching my partner is the wrong thing to do. The way I did it to this particular partner was probably not the best way to do it, as I said before. I will reevaluate it and reconsider how I approach my partners from now on.

[BayStateRef]

My bottom line to you is simple: Be very, very, very selective in when you decide to offer your partner help. Your overly long post as to the specifics of the play are irrelevant. I will accept that your partner made a mistake. The time to "fix it" is at a timeout or after the game. As the assignor,you have the ultimate ability to fix it: do not assign him any more games.

I have been on both sides of this situation. Very early in my career, I called a violation on the jumper for hitting the ball twice. My partner said and did nothing until after the game, when he told me two taps is legal; three is illegal. I never forgot every part of that: the correct rule and how well my partner handled my error. I try to do the same when I am paired with less experienced officials. I help them (if they want) only at half time and after the game. It works perfectly for us and for the teams. (And yes...I work a lot of AAU games.)

You really need to back off. You were wrong. You were wrong to go to your partner in the first place. You were wrong in both what you said and how you said it. And to be brutally honest, you were wrong to assign him the game, given your knowledge of his work habits.

As for your partner's email....take it with a grain of salt. He clearly does not have the understanding of the full scope of the rules. But he is 100 percent right in his basic point: you cannot overturn his call. And that's what you tried to do at the gym...and what you have tried to do on this forum.

You did not come here for advice or help. You wanted validation for your actions and when you didn't get it, you became annoyed. I suggest you listen a lot more to what is being posted here and type a lot less.

[Afrosheen]

Originally Posted by BayStateRef

My bottom line to you is simple: Be very, very, very selective in when you decide to offer your partner help. Your overly long post as to the specifics of the play are irrelevant. I will accept that your partner made a mistake. The time to "fix it" is at a timeout or after the game. As the assignor,you have the ultimate ability to fix it: do not assign him any more games.

I have been on both sides of this situation. Very early in my career, I called a violation on the jumper for hitting the ball twice. My partner said and did nothing until after the game, when he told me two taps is legal; three is illegal. I never forgot every part of that: the correct rule and how well my partner handled my error. I try to do the same when I am paired with less experienced officials. I help them (if they want) only at half time and after the game. It works perfectly for us and for the teams. (And yes...I work a lot of AAU games.)

You really need to back off. You were wrong. You were wrong to go to your partner in the first place. You were wrong in both what you said and how you said it. And to be brutally honest, you were wrong to assign him the game, given your knowledge of his work habits.

As for your partner's email....take it with a grain of salt. He clearly does not have the understanding of the full scope of the rules. But he is 100 percent right in his basic point: you cannot overturn his call. And that's what you tried to do at the gym...and what you have tried to do on this forum.

You did not come here for advice or help. You wanted validation for your actions and when you didn't get it, you became annoyed. I suggest you listen a lot more to what is being posted here and type a lot less.

Here is the best example of how not to provide advice to someone soliciting one. You disregard the many posts where I explicitly said that I was wrong in the way that I approach my partner, and with that said, I also stated that I will reconsider it. Here's a link to an example.

But that was not enough you. You needed to come into this thread and whack away with your hammer and point to every instance where you think I was wrong (which seems to include breathing) and then perform a psycho-babble of a post to make yourself feel better than you took five minutes of your day to understand why I'm objecting to people who aren't willing to understand the point of being a crew of officials. And then you have the audacity to tell me to back off after the way you tried to undress me here. It's as the cognitive dissonance shown here is to be seen as a joke. Unfortunately that isn't the case here.

I'm glad that there was a video here shown where an Div 1 NCAA ref goes up to his partner and makes him reconsider the backcourt violation. He showed how calmly he approached his partner and allowed him to make the final call.

Evidently, the people here think to do that is disrespectful. I appreciate that you told me this, but I disagree with it. And it seems that I have ruffled your feathers by saying that I disagree with you, which really isn't a surprise to me.

Originally Posted by Afrosheen

It seems to me that you guys are all focusing on this specific play way too much

Originally Posted by Afrosheen

shared this to you all in this thread so that I could go through it step by step and see where my particular mistake was.

Originally Posted by Afrosheen

Again, unfortunately, we couldn't step beyond the play and discuss on principle where and when we're supposed to confer on a call as a crew.

Afro, you wrote several times that posters here were focusing on the play itself, whereas you were interested in how to deal with your partner. I understand that.

However, the first 18 posts of this thread (not counting yours) are focused on how you should have dealt with your partner. The posters here told you what they thought, and then moved on to examining the play itself. It's kinda like a reverse hierarchy -- once the "big" questions are answered posters move on to the "small" stuff -- like debating the specifics of the play that caused your situation in the first place, or the "nitty gritty" as you mentioned here:

Originally Posted by Afrosheen

the nitty gritty stuff that will forever remain ambiguous and could be argued over for days.

Originally Posted by Afrosheen

So let me be real specific in regards to the play just to entertain this discussion, which really isn't the main point of the this read. And then I'll address each of the individual points thereafter.

I have learned that the more you write about the play, the more opportunity there is for someone here to criticize you. Why? It's the nature of clarity -- the more words we write (after a certain point), the less clear we become. Officiating, and the call your partner made, is based on judgement. And if you open up discussion of the play by detailing everything that took place, you are going to receive criticism of your judgement and rules knowledge.

If you wanted to focus on the man-management aspect of your situation, I think it was a mistake to flesh out the specifics of the original play.

Originally Posted by Afrosheen

This is getting absolutely ridiculous. I did not "repeatedly" tell him he was wrong.

Read what MD Longhorn wrote again. He was saying "members of this forum were repeatedly saying you were wrong" about how you were approaching other officials. The "repeatedly [telling] him he was wrong" did not refer to how you approached your partner in the OP.

[Afrosheen]

Yes, AremRed, I see now with your post how this blew up and I flamed the fire. I guess I got too used to talking with the officials I usually work with and thought the same mindset would be seen here.

I apologize to everyone here for misleading you. I appreciate the feedback even though I may not have agreed with all of it. I thought that we could have a civil discussion without making it personal, but that again was my fault for expressing that faith in complete strangers on an internet forum.

No problem Afrosheen. I have fanned the fire on a couple threads that got off the topic I wanted to talk about. I sincerely hope you stick around here and engage in more discussion, it just takes a little while to understand the culture here.

[MD Longhorn]

Originally Posted by Afrosheen

Yes, AremRed, I see now with your post how this blew up and I flamed the fire. I guess I got too used to talking with the officials I usually work with and thought the same mindset would be seen here.

I apologize to everyone here for misleading you. I appreciate the feedback even though I may not have agreed with all of it. I thought that we could have a civil discussion without making it personal, but that again was my fault for expressing that faith in complete strangers on an internet forum.

No harm, no foul. I apologize if you think I was being personal.

One thing I've definitely found here --- I learn more posting here than discussing in groups at clinics or between games and the like. Why? Because when you're discussing things in your own circle, people are more likely to just go with the flow, and less likely to say something that might ruffle a feather (perhaps moreso in your case since you have authority over them! How many officials who rely on you to schedule would be willing to say, "Hey boss, you kind of stepped on your partner there"? Likely none of them, even if they ALL thought it.). Here, people will give you the honest truth, an honest opinion of your actions. Take it for what it's worth - there are a lot of very very good, very very smart officials here. And don't assume all criticism is personal.

[Raymond]

Originally Posted by Afrosheen

...Evidently, the people here think to do that is disrespectful. I appreciate that you told me this, but I disagree with it. And it seems that I have ruffled your feathers by saying that I disagree with you, which really isn't a surprise to me.

You seem to be doing a lot of "whacking away" yourself. First you tell me I don't know how AAU works. And repeatedly you've told other posters they don't know how communicate within the confines of this forum. Now to top it off, you make a completely assinine statement that all us of here think the Tom Izzo scenario was handled in a disrepectful manner. The Tom Izzo scenario and you scenario have nothing to do with each other. Plus, in the Tom Izzo play, we see for ourselves how it was handled; in your play we only have your side of the story, which gets modified every time you don't like a response.

[Adam]

Originally Posted by Afrosheen

You're assuming a little too much with that last sentence. But regardless, I appreciate you're willingness to consider the entirety of my original post.

I agree with you that marginal stuff should not be questioned and that they're supposed to be stuff that should discussed during the half in closed quarters if at all, which is what I do.

But let me ask you, should the referees in Tom Izzo's game not have gone up to their partner on such a missed call? I don't consider that call to be marginal as it a complete kick of the rule.

My assumption is based on experience. Our response as partners can lead to a lot of trouble. If a caoch is already on edge about a call, and you start walking towards the calling official, he's going to assume you saw it his way and try to encourgage you to overturn the call or "talk to" your partner.

I have to say, from what I've read, you seem to have been pretty focussed on the division line when you were at the lead position. I just can't imagine even looking up there on that play unless I didn't trust my partner at all.

I don't recall the play you're talking about with Izzo.

[Camron Rust]

Some officials just have egos so big that even if they kick the call, they'll make something up to cover their butt when they wing it and get it wrong. I've seen it all too many times. Sounds like this guy is one of those. He was more worried about his ego than being a cooperative partner.

[Afrosheen]

Originally Posted by Camron Rust

Some officials just have egos so big that even if they kick the call, they'll make something up to cover their butt when they wing it and get it wrong. I've seen it all too many times. Sounds like this guy is one of those. He was more worried about his ego than being a cooperative partner.

Yes, and I didn't want to badmouth him on this forum as I wanted to continue to respect him. And I wasn't intending this thread to be about me and my partner but about how the officials here handle similar situations. But I guess that was the unfortunate sacrifice that got lost in everything.

[Raymond]

Originally Posted by Afrosheen

Ok, guy, for merely the sake of how you want to go forward, when I issued an apology explicitly saying that I have misled you, I thought we would be able to turn a corner and leave the personal stuff behind us. But if you're going to come back and continue giving such condescending diatribes, what value do you really think you're actually giving that you forcibly want me to accept without question?

Seriously what is your problem dude?

My problem? That you whine so much about "personal attacks" yet have no problem making partonizing a$$ comments like this:

Originally Posted by Afrosheen

...
Unfortunately, you don't know how AAU works. Teams pay money to play in these tournaments, ....

What kind of pompous official thinks other officials don't know how AAU basketball works?