First Talk, Then T - A Basketball Ref's Diary

A good way to start your season ...

... is to drive (or in this case take a train) to the city where the game takes place and arrive 6 hours early. Then, you may visit an old friend of your's and his family. After having lunch and a coffee with them you will still have plenty of time to go to your hotel, take a nap, watch some tape to prepare yourself for the things that might happen on the court, and even iron those wrinkles out of your referee pants. Altogether, it was just perfect. Everything went smoothly. One of my partners picked me up at the hote,l and when we arrived at the arena (which is only 4 months old) it felt great.

Fortunately, we did many things right yesterday night, so the feeling lasted ;)

ok, here is my review of the game. Our pre-game talk was nice and helpful, but a bit too much small talk in the beginning. I even started to change into my referee clothes to save some time afterwards. Usually we meet 90 minutes before the game, and start our "real" pre-game talk after 10, maybe 15, minutes, and only after that everybody changes and takes his time for whatever one needs to get himself ready for the game. I probably should have said something, but for some reason I didn't (I wil next time, I promise). In this case it didn't affect our performance much, even though I would have liked 5 extra minutes for visualization and relaxation techniques before we went out into the gym to greet the coaches and the people at the scorers table.

The arena is very nice. I haven't been there before, since there haven't been many games yet. It wasn't sold out as I expected, but there were still 5000 fans in the stands, and the atmosphere was awesome. During players introductions I just closed my eyes and enjoyed the moment. The waiting was finally over.

Game time. As I expected in my preview, it was a very intense game from the beginning. The home team had the lead throughout the first 3 quarters but it was pretty close all the way. In the 4th quarter the away team took the lead for the first time but wasn't able to close it out, and in the end the home team won by 3 points. Besides a short stretch in the 2nd quarter, when the game's character suddenly changed, we were really consistent and had total control at all times. We communicated very well, there was a lot of eye contact, reassurance and help using nonverbal communication. Nobody got lost in his own small world. By this, I mean that we found the right balance between being concentrated and relaxed at the same time. When you are too focused you lose this connection with your partners. And what's more important than not seeing your partners anymore, you see only the part of the game that is right in front of you and can't see the bigger picture anymore. Needless to say, in a game as tight as this one yesterday, you will questioned on a couple of close calls. But we handled this pretty well. I was open for questions and dealt with the emotions without overreacting. So in the end everybody (players and coaches) thanked us for a very good game. For myself, I can say that I was pleased with myself. I worked a lot on my weaknesses during the off-season and it paid! I had one important moving screen call outside my primary area of responsibility (where my partner's view was blocked by other players) and called an unsportsmanlike foul on a fastbreak where the player didn't attempt to play the ball but just grabbed his opponent from behind to prevent him from scoring. Both calls, from my point of view, were important to keep control of the game, and both were in last quarter. Last season, I might have missed at least the first one, and called a normal foul on the second one, but not yesterday ... Interestingingly, we had less than 40 foul calls which is significantly less than the average in our league, especially considering the new, stricter interpretations of the handchecking rules. Still, on a fan board on the internet I found a message today that said that the "referees were very strict". I think this tells a lot about our call selection.

Post-game. We had a referee coach in the stands who joined us after the game and his impression was also very positive. He still told me a couple of small things (of course), e.g. how I could improve my posture and facial expression after close calls that get questioned by coaches or players in order to appear strong, yet not unapproachable or stiff.

And that was it. A really good way to start your season ...

Cheers.

posted by BBallRef @ 9/28/2008 03:07:00 PM