Sub request during serve
 

So I was R2 at a club event this past weekend. R1 beckons for serve and then a player for the receiving team enters the sub zone and the player he's replacing comes to the sideline to sub out. The rest of the team is basically looking at me to blow my whistle for the sub.

Meanwhile the server is ready to serve to a team that is not ready to play. As R2, do I allow the serve to happen for an easy ace? Or do I kill the play, disallow the sub, administer the delay warning and ask the R1 for a replay?

Basically do I allow the receiving team to lose an easy point because they screwed up the sub request?

Did you deny the sub? Did you try to get them out of the sub zone?

By rule, not acknowledging the sub means the serving team can serve, and whatever happens after that happens. You also could have whistled it, denied it, and then issued the delay.

Is there any preventative officiating we can do here? As R2 you're on the receiving teams side watching that side so we should be able to see them coming? Can/should we wave the player back before they get to the sub zone?

Yes, and yes.

Right. But by doing that, I'm most likely gifting the serving team a point.

This is actually what I did.

The reason I did it this way is because during my women's season, I had a situation as R1 where I beckoned for serve and then the server went to sub out. My R2 tried to wave her back, but they didn't get it. They just didn't understand what was happening. I ended up calling an 8-second violation. My mentor said that, as an assignor, he would prefer me to call the delay warning and not gift a free point to the opponent.

They came to the zone after the whistle for serve. Because it was in a convention center, maybe they didn't hear the whistle -- I'm not sure. If I were a better ref, I might have remembered that they usually sub at that spot in the serving order. But other than that, I don't think there was anything more that I could have done to prevent it.

So...whistle for serve, player who is supposed serve instead of doing so goes to get subbed. That's it? What delay can you give here without a whistled sub request? For that matter, is it legal at all for the R2 to whistle at this point anyways?

Yes. That's it, exactly.

It is legal for either official to whistle to acknowledge the sub request at this point. So, as R1, I should've blown my whistle to recognize the sub in the sub zone and immediately denied the request and issued a delay warning.

I'm not sure that a whistle for sub is legal after the whistle for serve. Or any whistle, other than emergency/safety or conduct sanction, for that matter.

To be totally honest, I haven't dug into the rulebook to research this situation, but as I said in above, my mentor (who has made it to the NCAA Final Four a couple years ago) told me to whistle and issue the delay in an NCAA game. Maybe it's different for USAV -- or maybe he's wrong about this particular situation. But I doubt he's wrong about the NCAA rule.

It's an interpretation that you could stretch and use as the receiving team was not ready to play, which I guess could be construed as a delay. The R2 clearly has the right not to acknowledge this request, and I personally would very much be (minus contact) be pushing the sub out of the sub zone and saying clearly THE WHISTLE HAS BLOWN, NO SUB before the sub gets to the zone.

But I guess if that's been done and they insist this sub is happening, then delay (and also, no sub).