I met a gentleman from a Western suburb Saturday at the book signing in Minnetonka. He saw my appearance on KARE 11 and came into the store to get a signed copy of the book. Guess who I saw today when I was officiating a fall league at 43 Hoops? The same guy. He read the whole book last night and loved it. He told me “I wish I would have read it 10 years ago when my kids started playing. This should be in the starter kit for every official and every parent shouldn’t be able to register their kids for youth basketball without reading it first.” That was great to hear. During the game, there was a play in which I called a backcourt violation on his son’s team (covered in Chapter 19) because a teammate passed the ball to another teammate who left the ground in the backcourt, caught the pass in the air and landed in the front court. After the game he told me “Before reading the book, I probably would have said something about that being a bad call. Now I know better.”

A couple other e-mails I want to pass along, one from my friend Mike Nill, who was on the 1989 Owatonna State Champion team. He was the starting power forward and made a living hitting the Horace Grant-like 15 footer. He wrote, ”

 

Don’t be ashamed, Mike. Most former players-turned-parents think they know all the rules, and often only know some of them.

I also received this e-mail from my friend Tim Harkness from St. Louis Park, which I thought was fitting:

 

 

  

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 1:25 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.