No Coach?
 

Had one of the odder situations I ever encountered yesterday.

Two what NYS calls C level schools for a JV game. The home school has a very weird setup where the JV and Varsity play at separate locations, both WAY off campus, and are like 10 (!) miles apart. The JV field is especially hard to find if you do not know the area. Game is scheduled for 4:30. The visiting team is coming from a town that's almost an hour and a half away.

So my partner and I are there, and the visiting team bus pulls up ABOUT 4:15, the kids pile out, with an adult male along with them. I start putting the gear on, then go over and start going, "Hello, coach.." Ecept - ITS NOT THE COACH! Turns out the coach had to finish a class or something, and hopefully would be right behind..

Welllll.....4:30 comes and goes, and the male - who was a parent, and freely admitted he was not qualified to coach, started to hit some grounders for the kids, and my partner and I started wondering: what do we do? Between the two of us, we have a LOT of years in, and never had encountered this before. The home coaches volunteered to help coach the other team, but we were sort of skeptical of that - liability and all. The bus driver decided to go over to the other field to get one of the varsity coaches - should I have mentioned this field is in a cellular Black Hole? finally, after the bus had left, the coach comes roaring up the road - turns out he had literally gone EVERYwhere looking for the damn field!

We get the game started -JUST before we would have got a late fee, of course - and wouldn't you know, it turned out to be a VERY nice quick 3-0 game that didn't go more than 1:20?? :D

How would you have handled this?

Not a darn thing until a responsible adult is present and in charge.

If I have to wait 10-20 minutes, I wait.

Well we were very close to 30....

And adding into the mix, of course, is all the lousy weather lately, so we certainly were going to wait -- no walking away on this one! But still, there might have been a time when push came to shove.

As long as I have a parent there who's a proper chaperone, I don't mind waiting. If it gets towards 20-30 minutes, I'll start making phone calls.

I won't be happy about it, but hey, it's not about me. I just hope I don't have another assignment too soon after this one.

And therein lay the problem - this field is in Cell Phone Hell....

Well, someone's gotta venture out of the abyss. :p

As it turns out it all worked out for you in the end, but this is a good question. I think this is where we put our integrity to the test. If it's about the girls you wait, wait until you can't wait any longer. If it's about the money you leave. If you wait the teams , the assigner, the parents all appreciate your efforts. If you leave you are rightfully called a money grubbing fool, and you may be lucky to get another assignment, at least from my assigner. We had nearly the same situation V plays at the school, JV at a remote field. One umpire stayed the other left. One umpire got paid (did the game solo), one umpire did not and was not assigned games again.

The assigner?, OK... The parent's, maybe... maybe not.

Not necessarily

C'mon, you know that isn't right. Remember, you said RESPONSIBLE adult