High school basketball fans riding the referees

You know, that would be a pretty neat game to be a part of.

 

Let me throw a little sociology into this discussion. People are spending more time than ever isolated by technology and the disappearance of community. So they go to athletic events and they don't know how to act in a public setting. They think they can yell at actual people and be as anonymous as if he or she were the TV or computer screen.

I'm not saying that's an excuse, but that has to be factored in. We're losing all sense of what it means to be polite and responsible to each other because if the other person is a stranger, fuck 'em and insult 'em, there's no consequences.

 

naw, don't buy it.

people have long been dicks at high school basketball games, but it seems like it has been taken up a notch throughout the past decade.

 

Today in girls basketball (a game I was a part of as a coach, not media, but noticeable bad fan behavior anyway) ...

Visiting team (which has a bunch of fans, since there's really nothing else to do in their town) is up 5 with four seconds left, and gets fouled. It was a hard shove, but the game was clearly over at that point.

Their fans spend the next several seconds, the entire minute of the ensuing timeout, and the time while their player was shooting her free throws -- basically, two solid minutes in a game that was, for all intentens and purposes, over -- whining that the foul wasn't called intentional. Seriously, is it going to make THAT big of a difference which team gets to inbound in a 7-point game with 4 seconds left?

(amazingly, they weren't whining too much when the home team had a basket at the horn waved off even though it had gone through the hoop before the buzzer sounded ... I'll admit I set a rather bad example for the junior high team I coach in the moments after that).

And in Indiana, the home team hires all officials except in tournament games (with the exception of a couple of conferences). And yes, that can lead to lots of problems, like coach/ADs hiring their school's alumni to do big conference games.

 

THREE SECONDS! THREE SECONDS! After about a second and a half.

I'm glad people out there like to be officials and refs and umpires. Because it never crossed my fucking mind to go through that.

 

Three seconds and over the back (which is not a foul in my state's high school games. Pushes are, but there is no such thing as over the back) are the typical parent calls here.

Two of the towns that frequently travel to my town have very, very obnoxious parents that simply switch sports by season - football/volleyball to basketball to soccer/baseball/softball. And it's the same 10 parents the whole time.

Then there's a father of one of the boy's basketball players that's an absolute riot. He criticizes the officiating, coaches his kid and rags other parents all game long with a voice that carries across an entire football stadium. He's not as viscous or personal as a lot of the other parents though. Just louder. I've actually had quite a few conversations with him away from a game and he's a good guy.

Another reason it's probably gotten worse over the past decade or so is parents are now, especially by high school, counting on their kid to get an athletic scholarship somewhere/support them in their old age. If Suzie Guard has 13 points instead of 15 because of a basket that was waived off, the local D-II Irrelevant U might give her partial scholarship to someone else.

 

i think you make an excellent point.

 

Let's be honest, basketball officiating, on every level, isn't what it used to be.

As the game has evolved, so has the officiating. Almost every call now is left up to the ref's interpretation of the rules. I don't think Jesus Christ could get through a game without blowing a call or two with these rules.

Nobody has any idea what constitutes a hand-check foul. A charge on one end is a block on the other. Getting a travel call right is like trying to hold water. And trying to assign fouls on the two centers who are banging the hell outta one another is impossible.

I'm not saying it's the fault of these refs that the rules are like this, but it is what it is. There's too much interpretation, too many judgment calls and very little black and white.

Should parents be riding the hell out of these officials? Of course not. But it is easy to understand why they're complaining.

 

But when your team is winning (or losing) by 20 or more in the final two minutes, shut the fuck up.

 

another excellent point.

 

At a girls soccer match the other night, important postseason game, and the visiting fans are giving the refs plently. Ton of handball call shouts throughout the game. So the players from the boys team of the opponent shat shouting handball whenever the opponents touch the ball with their feet, give the touchdown signal when another shot goes over the crossbar, all of that.

Late on, the hometeam puts a shot over the bar. One parent from the visitors imitates the touchdown signal. The boys team shouts over "Very original", parent shouts back at them some more, kids should "We like to argue with 16 year olds!" Parents shut up. I double over laughing behind them.

 

Well, yeah. I thought we were far enough past the original question that I could skate without answering it.