presence

[A Pennsylvania Coach]

Last night, semis of the rec league I play in. One official is the rec league assignor, 25+ years as an official, well-respected, etc. We are up 21 at halftime and pushed it up to close to 30 at the start of the second before they rallied back to about a 18-20 point margin maybe five minutes into the 20-minute half. A call goes against the opponents and the hot-headed point guard, who thinks they still have a chance to win (they didn't), fires the ball toward the opposite end of the court. It goes up and over the fence that encloses our court. Believe it or not, neither official saw this.

But the vet realizes what happened, as our players are pointing it out and, of course, the ball is gone. It's probably a few seconds too long after it happened to call a technical, and besides, he didn't actually see it, but it wasn't hard to infer. If he lets it slide, he risks losing control of the game. If he calls it, maybe he guesses wrong or he looks like he is calling something because we are telling him that the opponent did something illegal.

Now we play running clock except for free throws and the last two minutes. But a ball going over the fence would also get the clock stopped, which is what the timer had done (maybe for the ball going out, maybe for the upcoming free throws). So the official turns to the timer and tells her to keep the clock running. At this point, no one had gone for the ball yet and when he said this, the hot-headed point guard started to protest, realized he was in a no-win situation, and took off running for the ball. Probably close to a minute of their potential comeback time expired before play resumed.

I was very impressed with how he handled this, so I thought I'd share.

Oh, we won by about 35 and have the finals next week.