Well, the rest of our trip was fairly uneventful from a travel perspective – we got back on track to Indianapolis, then went to Greensboro on Thursday, and then I went to Dallas on Friday night for an officiating camp. Six flights, six cities, and three meetings in four days – not bad!
From a business standpoint everything went well. We picked up one of the contracts so far out of the three potential clients that we visited, and are waiting to hear back from the others. We also found on on Friday that we picked up another customer – that we didn’t even have to visit! Nice.
I spent my weekend at “camp”, where basketball officials go to train, learn some new things, and get hired. I already work for this coordinator of officials, but of course I am always looking to move up! Camp went well and I came away with a few things from an officiating standpoint that I thought were really good — here are a couple of the items for my officiating brethern out there:
- I had an out of bounds play where the player stepped out and then back in really quickly. I whistled the violation and pointed and gave the color correctly. The feedback from the staff was that in that scenario I should say what happened (i.e. “out of bounds” or “stepped on the line”) to give more information. The idea here is that the coach may look up and see the player in bounds and wonder what the heck the call is. Good idea!
- Two staff members were saying that if they want to send a message to a player they might simply talk to each other in front of the player – say, during a free throw. For example, one might say, “Blue 32’s going to have to help us out down here in the post and get his hands off, don’t you think?” This avoids the problem of the coach telling you not to talk to his players — pretty smart!
In my first game we had a timeout with less than a minute left to play. We gathered at mid-court to conference with one of the staff members and he turned all of us towards him – and away from the scoreboard. He then said, “OK, no cheating…” to which I promptly replied, “9.9” – the answer to his forthcoming question, “How much time is on the clock?” I’ve been to camp too many times to be caught on that one! My co-officials weren’t sure of the exact time – they knew it was about 9 seconds. However, I got a “plus” mark for knowing the exact time. The main thing is that one of us knew – because officiating is a team sport! There are going to be times when we save our partners and times where they save us.
Overall it was a good, but tiring weekend. Partly due to officiating and attending meetings, and partly due to late night poker playing. I didn’t win either tournament of the weekend – instead busting out on hands like AK vs K2 when my opponent would spike a 2 on the river (true story)! However, I made up for it in the cash side games that consisted of the people that had busted out. Best hand from one of those games – Ac8c when the flop came 2c3c9c. The player to my right kept betting into me until he put me all-in on the river, which I happily called. He had the K-high flush. As my good friend J-Flo says – “You lose!”
Carrie has been bragging on me so much lately I decided that turnabout is fair play! Actually, it’s nice to have someone in your life to brag about you – rather than you bragging on yourself!
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