Word Jujitsu

[Antonio.King]

My favorite part about being the second referee is the challenge of communicating to coaches of all kinds: hot heads, jokesters, sarcastic ones, cool/calm, you name it.

Using our word jujitsu as second referee can make or break our relationships with coaches during those tough times. So I'd love to hear about how others were able to talk their way out of a situation, and how it resulted in their favor.

It's kinda cool to share techniques like these as it's interesting to hear what works for other people.

I'll share first:

In an NCAA women's match, a ball is attacked (what seems to be) out of bounds. Both line judges (disregard their technique) who are very strong, signal out of bounds. As I'm strongly transitioning to the fault side to reaffirm the line judge's signal and what the play result looked like from my view, the first referee points in the opposite direction, followed by the touch signal.

It was 24-24 at this point in the set (can't recall which), and up jumps the home head coach marching toward the attack line whom the point went against.

I went to him immediately, diverted his attention to me, and here's the conversation that followed:

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Coach: There is no way there was a touch on that!!!!!
Me: Coach, he came up with that right away and without hesitation.
Coach: Seriously? These line judges are damn good and I disagree with that call completely!
Me: I agree, the line judges are great! And that alone should tell you how confident the first referee would have to be to go against them. But, right now coach, we have to resume play.
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He sat down with no further intervention about the call. Not saying it's necessarily the correct, by-the-book way to handle something like this, but this technique works for me, and has continued to work.

What're some situations you've had where you had to use your word jujitsu to get out of or explain?

[FMadera]

I can banter a lot more dealing with adults or men. When they don't like a double contact called, I like to tell them, "You're way better than that."

Works like a charm, except when they reply, "No I'm not."