3 T's, 2 Days

Christmas has come and gone for me and the rest of us, I hope you all enjoyed it. I did not. I was unable to go home to Canada to visit my family for the holidays. I just recently moved in with a friend in a new town, and I did all this during the Christmas break….some break. At least I had two weeks off from officiating OSAA games, but I am ready to hit the second half of the season with vim and vigor.

An interesting thing occurred just before the break in some games, I handed out three technical fouls in two days. Now I was not at all emotional about any of them either, which for me is a first and a giant accomplishment. It is extremely difficult to not take anything said to you by a coach or player or fan personally, but I assure you with practice it can happen. The game situations where I had to assess the technicals were completely warranted, but I can now understand things from the point of view of the coaches. Before this season, and a huge blowup in the summer at a couple of camps I attended, I had no idea how coaches felt or how I came across on the court in my non-verbal communication. That's a whole other entry though.

I tend to frown on the court, almost scowl at the players when I call a foul or talk to the coaches. Well, now that I had a number of peers talk to me about my demeanor on-court, I realized that I needed to smile more and take what I was doing much less seriously. This doesn’t mean I want to let more fouls get by me, or let the game get out of control, no way. It means that I needed to deal with tense situations much more calmly, and the only way for me to be calm personally is to smile and laugh or joke around with people. When I assessed these T’s to the coaches, I actually put a little humor into them.

The first T was the first half of a freshman girl’s game in downtown Portland, it went against the visiting coach. I had talked with her about walking out onto the court and also about her borderline comments to myself about the way we were calling the game. To be truthful, it was a God-awful mess and no amount of over-officiating was going to clean up what bad players or bad coaching had already achieved. Granted, my partner didn’t know what the hell he was doing out there, but he was trying very hard to learn from me. A couple of bad calls later and the visiting coach came unglued, her 6’3” frame walked out on the court and said something I don’t really remember. I was within six feet of her and proceeded to walk at her, give the T signal and told her to please sit down and be quiet. She continued to fume, I asked her to count to ten and breath deeply and smiled as I said it. This made the assistant coach sitting beside her chuckle and say that she’d handle it, and she did. There wasn’t a peep out of that bench the rest of the game. They always want to test your boundaries.

The second game I gave the T to the home coach, which was a crowd pleaser, but she walked onto the court again like the first one and I popped her for it. I just shook my head and told her, “I told you not to walk onto the court coach, you give me no choice. Merry Christmas.”

The third T was to a kid the following day who swore loudly after a call I had just made against him. I told him Santa wasn’t stopping at his house for that one. The little rat probably still got everything he wanted anyway. My point is, taking anything on the court personally was a mistake I no longer make, and getting worked up over idiotic actions or words from players or coaches is pointless. They are looking for a reaction to get you in trouble so they don’t look like a fool for flying off the handle. I have almost become bored with the things people say to me now, even the crowd because I always have a better zinger to wing back at them. Sometimes I say it too, but most times I just shut up and leave the venting for here. I’m looking forward to a fun second half of the season. Until I write again….

Dave