Give me the Whistle

So the Lady Petrels are off to a great start (3-0) on this young season, but I'm going to limit the amount of praise I give them in this post because I would like to talk about referees today. If any referee assigners out there ever read this, which I seriously doubt, please stop sending your C team to referee our beloved Lady Petrels basketball team. This is not me ranting about bad calls because of a loss, no, I'm complaining even after the Petrels stomped Piedmont last night in Demorest. The final score was not truly telling of the beating, but I digress. This was the second game this season where the Lady Petrels have had to suffer through some poor officiating. In all fairness, the first such game came in Virginia a couple of weekends ago and the referees weren't in shape enough to keep up with the torrid pace that both teams were playing at, so both teams were the recipients of many unfavorable calls. If you're not there to see the play, then you guess on the call and you make some wrong calls and that's what happened. Last night, however, was just odd.

For starters, a three second violation was called at one point on the Lady Petrels as a player drove into the lane and kicked the ball back out to a perimeter shooter. The player was probably in the lane for three seconds, but who calls that. I thought the unwritten rule was that you don't call three seconds until it becomes so obvious that the opposing team and fans are counting for you. That play really wasn't a big deal in the game, but it added to the humor that was last night’s referee crew. The big issue for me last night was the insane amount of blocking fouls, off the ball fouls, and loose ball fouls that were whistled.

Had that referee crew been officiating a men's game last night, the game would have been decided by each team’s third-team as all starters and second-team players would have been sitting on the bench with five fouls apiece. The Lady Petrels are an aggressive basketball team, and when the referees take that away, you take away a lot of what has made them so successful the past couple of seasons. Notice I called them aggressive, not physical, there is a big difference between the two and last night's referees couldn't comprehend that. It was not as if the Lady Petrels were out there pushing around a bunch of 3rd grade kids on crutches, they were playing against a team that was just as capable as they are and our ladies were penalized because of there aggressiveness.

If referees were to actually call every foul as defined by the official rules of basketball then they would be blowing their whistle very 10 seconds in Today's style of basketball. The game has evolved, and yes, that means the women's game has evolved too. This is not 1950's basketball anymore. Our Lady Petrels would dominate Gene Hackman's Hoosiers (we've just got to cover Jimmy Chitwood on the perimeter). Just because one team does not play an aggressive style of basketball does not mean you penalize a team for playing aggressively and last night our ladies were penalized. In fact, they were penalized many times for just being out on the court, the whistle just kept blowing. As a referee, you have what they call discretion and just because something is a foul according to the official rules does not mean you have to call it; you get to ask yourself is this "foul" affecting the play in any way, if not can I maybe just give the player a verbal warning to let them know I'm watching? Basketball is an extremely tough game to referee, it's fast paced, lots of rules and all of the action takes place on a small playing surface (in comparison to baseball, football, soccer). That being said, I understand that referees are not going to make every call, but last night they almost did, and that doesn't go over too well in today's game. Not every "foul" is a foul. Ok, I’m done bitching now.

As tough as last night was with the foul situation The Lady Petrels got a great win over a Piedmont team that appeared in last year's National Tourney. Good win ladies and let's get two more great wins this weekend.