The months of May and June offer a little fun in the form of off-season high school basketball camps. Coaches take their prospective teams for the next year to colleges and schools who host some three- or four-day semi-competitive "tournaments."
Most of these camps pay a little bit of money for HS referees to come and work, and the UHSAA formally sponsors some of the bigger ones and turns them into "referee camps" where we register and get mentored and critiqued by college officials and the HS higher-ups.
This week I've been working Dick Hunsaker's camp at UVSC to make a little cash on the side. These tournaments lack a lot of the formality and intensity of regular season games, but it's still remarkable how competitive some of the games can be, and we referees are certainly not immune from getting yelled at...
"How on EARTH could you call that a charge?!?"
(with hands thrown in the air and a look of incredulity that you'd expect from someone who'd just been told they were adopted from China)
"That's a foul! Hey!... Hey!... That's a foul!"
(repeated three times with accompanying foot-stomping and pointing)
"You're KILLING me! Turn around and watch when you're running down the court!!"
(sorry coach, I'm still working on being able to rotate my head a full 180-degrees)
Yes, it's all part of the fun. But the most interesting to me was a comment I got from a coach that wasn't coaching at the time. Hunsaker (UVSC's head coach) was sitting at the scorer's table watching the game I was doing Tuesday morning, when I called an offensive foul for an illegal screen...
"That's a good call! Good call. That's a GOOD call..."
It was a good call (and an easy one to make, the dumb kid was shoving the defender right in front of me), but I found Hunsaker's praise a little humorous. I've watched him coach enough to know he rides the officials as much as anybody, but he still took time to congratulate my "good call."
Most of the coaches I know are perfectly reasonable and personable off the court. I've interviewed a lot of them working for the newspaper and have never had any problems. There's just something about stepping into the competitive arena of sports that changes things. Normal standards of behavior do not apply.
I've learned that this also applies to referees. Since you can't expect coaches and players to act as they would off the court, I have to change the way I act and react as well. In a highly competitive environment where the No. 1 objective of everyone (but me and my partner) is to win, I've got to change my natural mindset to maintain control and respect.
I've learned that, most of the time, there's no need to (and in fact it's best not to) respond to a coach's or player's shouts of protest - it seems obvious, but it's not what we're naturally accustomed to doing in social settings. When a coach asks a legitimate question, I've learned to keep my answer accurate, but concise, and to resist the temptation of over-explaining myself in an attempt to "convince" the coach that I'm right. He'll never agree. I've also learned it's actually OK to just end the discussion and walk away at those times. As soon as I start arguing I lose respect and control. We naturally learn to make ourselves likable in society, but in refereeing, you can't be worried about people liking you. You can only be worried about making sure you're given proper respect.
It really is a different world when you step on the basketball court. But, the mental, physical, and emotional work of managing a good game between two competitive teams brings a lot of satisfaction, and I continuously find officiating to be an absolute blast - especially the better I get at doing it.
3 comments:
So, how do you objectively know whether or not you are a good referee? Is that hard to get a sense of?
Don't you second guess yourself? I do that even when I'm just watching football with a group of people, and I KNOW I'm right, but someone else pipes up and says ti was a clean hit, or whatever. It makes me stop and reevaluate whether or not I really know what's going on.
I rely on "peer review" to kind of gauge where I'm at. I try to ask for feedback or tips from the older officials when they're around and the camps are always helpful. And, generally speaking, I know it when I blow a call or let a game get out of control. I think like anything else though, rather than worry about how good you are according to an arbitrary standard, it's best to just focus on how you can improve and get better.
Second guessing is another one of those things I've had to retrain myself on. I think we're taught in society to first reconsider our own position when a conflict comes up. To an extent I still do that as a referee when a coach has a legitimate question or concern that he brings up in a respectful way. But, with experience, I've also just learned to trust myself. Nobody else in that arena (except my partner) has spent the time, effort, money, etc. to earn the right to officiate that game. Half the battle is really just acting confident... We call it "selling" a call. If you look like you're 100% sure of yourself when you make a call, people are going to question you a lot less.
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