Sure
The day in the life is kinda non existent cause I do it after work lol. I'm basically on here with y'all all day when I'm not busy at work but lemme discuss it from this perspective.
This is my 9th year doing this. I wish I would've done it a lot sooner. But I get my schedule for games at least a week out. I'll look at the matchups and decide how I'm going to mentally prepare for each game.
Is it a rivalry? Then I need to get locked in cause records go out the window but if they are both good and the game might decide district winners, then you have to be mindful of emotions. If it's a snooze fest then I start thinking of things I can be working on. Watching film is one thing but actual games are very vital to development imo. When I say I tend to work on things, I'm mainly talking about my positioning on the court, my court presence, my vocal projection and hand signals when I report fouls, etc. Those games are typically a lot slower and I can focus on my primary area of coverage and start to look for things that a lot of other officials tend to miss because they ball watch.
I have more but let me know if this is what you had in mind when you asked me this.
Idk if I've told this to y'all but a dude told me something a long ass time ago that has stuck with me ever since. He was like when you call a girls game, use the pre game to see who can actually dribble, who can actually shoot, pass, etc... If the whole team has on kneepads, you're gonna be in for a long night. I thought he was full of shit but every game that I've had where the teams have knee pads on was a foul fest. Those games are the worst bc you are doing more babysitting than refereeing. To me, the best games are the ones where it's like I'm not there. I'm only blowing my whistle to signal the ball out of bounds, calling timeouts... Administrative type shit. I hate calling ticky tack fouls but sometimes you have to in order to keep the game/players from getting out of control.
I mentioned watching off ball in my last post. 90% of fights start from off ball shit going on. You have to train yourself/eyes to look off ball when the ball isn't in your primary area of coverage with no competitive matchups. When I see lil shit going on, I tell them in game "hey, cut that shit out". Usually that does it cause it lets them know I'm looking. I then go to each coach at some point and tell them hey, talk to him cause if he do it again, I'm throwing him out. This also helps as well.
Knock twice and I were refereeing maybe shoot 7yrs ago at this cross town rivalry game and a fight broke out in that bitch
. As it was happening i was nervous cause that shit started looking like malice at the palace. I ended up calling the game with like 4 min left on the clock. When I went back to watch the film, I noted how many fouls were called, how many intentional fouls we called, etc..I felt like we did everything we could. Player A fouled Player B on the way to the basket forcing him into the padding that's usually on the wall under the goal. Player A walks off... Player B turns around and sees Player C who they've been going at it with the entire night at various points in the game. Player A swings on em and it was a brawl after that.
It was my second year and one of my first assignments as the designated R official (there's the R, and two umpires). This was a classic case of knowing what you do cause you read about it in the rules book but failing at it when it actually happens in your game. My crew was supposed to do so much shit but at the time, I was just trying to make sure I wasn't gonna get swung on so I just watched and observed. I let the coaches and off duty police break everything up. By rule we were supposed to note who all came off the bench and disqualify them and if there were enough players, kick the fans out and finish the game. It was a blowout anyway and neither one of them were going to the playoffs so fuck that.
Haven't had a fight in a game since.
