No Coach?

[ASA/NYSSOBLUE]

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??

How would you have handled this?