Free Advantage Disadvantage by Yale Jaffe Page B

and
increased the likelihood of future favorable rulings. During one
game, Billy called a player for travelling – a pretty routine call
in freshman basketball. The player stared down Billy in
disrespectful way. As he sent a substitute into the game, the coach
yelled out in a booming voice:
    “Son, this is not the NBA. In high school ball, you
cannot walk without dribbling. Grab some bench!”
    After clearly embarrassing the player in front of
the freshman parents and fans, he rested the indignant player for
the balance of the first half. At halftime, as the referees were
walking away from the gym, the team trotted by on the way to their
locker room. The coach followed. As he passed Billy, he patted him
on the rear and said,
    “Billy, no way was that travelling. This kid is
going to be a great player, isn’t he?”
    You have to love a coach who respects officials,
calls them by their first names, and even vouches for them in order
to teach discipline to his team. This coach was a rare individual
amongst his peers.
    After a couple seasons of exclusively working
freshman basketball, Billy’s officiating objectives formed.
Basketball officiating was an avocation; a hobby that he aspired to
conquer. He was fearless about the location of the assignments:
black, white, or brown schools. All of them, in the city or
suburbs, it did not matter who was playing. Over the winter, he had
a discussion with the assignment chairperson. The chairperson told
Billy that he would have to do outside activities to improve his
skills and competitiveness. He should: 1) attend a summertime
official’s camp, 2) become an active member of an officiating
association, and 3) regularly stay to watch the varsity officials
work their games after his underclass assignment was finished.
    There was a wide variety of summer camps to attend.
Some of them were built on a scam. Players and teams paid to play
in a particular high school’s summer league with the promise of
patched officials regulating the games. Referees paid to work the
games for evaluations, and with practice, bad habits corrected.
Therefore, the people running the camps collected from both ends,
teams and officials. Nice hustle for those who could work it!
    Billy could have cared less about the money. His
real estate legal work yielded plenty of income. He looked forward
to personalized instruction at the camp as a way to move up to
sophomore games. Most camps had a two to three hour classroom
session before the league started actual games. Billy picked up
good information at the meeting and he looked forward to the
on-court instruction. While the camp’s flyer suggested that each
camper would work two to four games, Billy‘s schedule included nine
games. He realized that after the fifth game without any on-court
reviews, he was just helping to staff the games free, not obtaining
officiating training. The assignment chairperson, aka the summer
camp coordinator, required Billy to participate but was nowhere
around to help him improve his skills. Major Lesson 2, the
basketball golden rule: the assignment chairperson holds the
gold.
    Not coincidentally, after attending his first, but
worthless camp, his schedule improved mysteriously with an upgrade
to mostly sophomore games. Lesson 3: play ball with the
assigner.
    At the further urging of the assigner, Billy joined
an official’s association, which met once a week prior to the
season. The most heavily attended meeting was the second. They
called this the “Rules Meeting” because they went through all one
hundred questions on the annual referee state test. He wondered if
the state cared that so many people in association clusters were
getting the same score on the test. The best part of the meetings
was the open question forums where dumb questions drew harsh
ridicule, and subtle rule situations analyzed. A new official posed
one of Billy’s favorite questions after a discussion emphasizing
the required movement of the referee along