With great interest, I read a front page story in the St. Paul Pioneer Press headlined “A generation on the sidelines” written by reporter Bob Shaw. This is the first in a four-part series about the declining participation rates in high school athletics. The report cites statistics that the participation rates in Minnesota have dropped in half in only one generation. The story was well-written and very interesting. I look forward to the rest of the series. Today’s story talked about the reasons for decline: hyper-competition at a young age, sports are time-consuming, sports are expensive and sports, in some instances, are not very fun.

The ending quote is the best. A parent/coach is quoted in the story saying “Parents have messed it up. We are all guilty.”

I wrote about many of these same concepts in BasketCases. If basketball is no longer fun, players will quit by age 15. The main reason, obviously, is youth parents and coaches who push their kids too much. Below is a link to today’s story. Take five minutes to read it and watch for the other stories in the series:

http://www.twincities.com/ci_11963532?nclick_check=1 

Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Gail Rosenblum wrote a great column this week about Curby Rogers, a youth basketball referee who takes a great approach about making basketball a positive experience. I do not know Curby and have not worked with him, but from what I read, we share similar beliefs as Gail wrote “of championing competition, not obsession.” Take five minutes to read the column. Here is a link to it on the Strib’s web site:

 http://www.startribune.com/local/41470747.html?page=1&c=y

The biggest challenge I have in marketing BasketCases is reaching the basketball parents, coaches and officials who think this book does not apply to them. Nothing lathers me up more.

I can’t promise that everyone will enjoy reading BasketCases, even though all the feedback I have received has been 100 percent positive. What I can promise is that this book could not be any more relevant to parents, coaches and officials at all levels of youth basketball from the first organized games in third grade through high school varsity. As KARE -11 sports anchor and youth basketball coach/parent Randy Shaver says on the back cover of BasketCases: “It will change the way how you watch the game, and in some cases, that’s a good thing.”

Any basketball coach, parent or official who doesn’t think this book applies to them is mistaken. Everyone who participates in basketball can learn from, and the vast majority will enjoy BasketCases. The perception that “I’m not the BasketCase he is writing about” is a tough one to break. I have often found that the person who thinks he or she doesn’t need to read BasketCases is the one who needs to read it the most.

Case in point. Earlier this fall, I spoke at a couple of the training sessions for MYAS youth basketball officials and had the opportunity to sell copies of the book afterward. I remember speaking to one particular official for awhile. He talked about how this book is needed. I encouraged him to get one himself and he declined.

About a month ago, I worked with this same official for the first time during a weekend youth basketball tournament. He asked me about how the book was doing before our first game and proceeded over our block of games to reinforce why BasketCases should be required for reading — and comprehension — before any youth basketball officials is allowed to put on a jersey and blow the whistle.

This official, more than any official I have ever worked with, watched the ball the entire time. He failed to understand basic rules about traveling, had no concept of court coverage (wherever the ball was, his eyes were, leaving 8 of the 10 players unofficiated when the ball was in my primary), over-officiated, called ticky-tack falls, had no concept of advantage/disadvantage and began to wear down physically after only a couple of games.

Outside of a lack of fitness, I don’t mind those issues because they all can be corrected with proper education. I tried to help. After a couple of suggestions, my partner clearly didn’t want the help. So never in the history of the world has an official been so wrong when they thought they were so right. In BasketCases, one of the great illustrations by Wade Gardner uses the cartoon balloon “Don’t you realize I’m a professional seventh-grade girls’ basketball coach?”  This official was one of those “professional seventh-grade basketball officials” who thought he knew it all. In reality, he had several issues that were only masked and not exposed by the lower level of play.

As I write in BasketCases, I did many things wrong when I started officiating in 1998. I did the best I could based on the knowledge I had. The difference, however, is I was always asking other partners how I could improve. If you are new official, don’t make the same mistakes I made when you started. You now have a resource named BasketCases that has never been available before. The teams you officiate deserve the best that you can do because whatever the grade level, nothing is more important than that game to those participants on that day.

When people who have kids that play in sports other than basketball learn that I wrote a book to make youth basketball a better experience, I frequently hear comments like: You need to write about hockey parents, football parents, soccer parents or baseball parents. I have no plans to write a sequel to BasketCases to help parents in other youth sports lower their blood pressure. I only officiate basketball and have no intentions (nor does my wife want me to have intentions) to start officiating another sport.

But, in a way, I’ve already shared important lessons with parents of different youth sports. Most of those parents just don’t know about it yet. Most of the lessons in BaskeCases can be applied to any sport. I received a letter from my friend Mike Savidge who lives near Seattle, which amplifies this point.

He wrote: “Thanks for sending the book. It was a good read and brought back memories of parents when I coached hockey. This book can easily be read by parents and coaches of any youth sport. Great job. The Savidges.” Thanks, Mike, for the letter.

With Mother’s Day and Father’s Day fast approaching, consider picking up a copy of BasketCases and consider your shopping done.

I received a note from Chris Olson, a fellow basketball official who I worked with a couple of times this year. We worked together one night in February, the same night I signed a copy of BasketCases for him.

He wrote: “Derek: Thanks for the book. I got home from our game at Jordan @ 9:45 and read straight through until 12:45 a.m. - finished it that night. Enjoyed it.”

Moral of the story: If you pick up BasketCases, you may need to clear your calendar for three hours because once you start reading, it’s hard to put down. Thanks, Chris.

I just got home from a great girls’ basketball game in southern Minnesota. In fact, the drive took approximately 90 minutes. The home team won a close game by 3; the visiting team had a chance to tie it at the end of regulation, but missed. After the game, my partner and I talked in our locker room about the fact that neither of use wanted to change a call or felt me missed a call that we should have gotten. We were particularly sharp tonight. We are most nights, but as we all know some games are a lot more difficult to officiate than others. This game had a lot of shooting fouls, but few violations, no illegal screens and little displacement. The players on both team were obviously well coached in the fundamentals of the game.

After leaving the locker room, my partner and I walked past a group of parents presumably from the team that lost the game, judging by their sweatshirts and other garb sporting allegiance to their town. One of the dads just couldn’t help himself. He said “You guys must have a short car ride home tonight.” To which my partner replied, something about the ride being not so bad that we just had to return to the Twin Cities.

After we past the parents and were by ourselves, I said to my partner, “That comment completely went over your head, didn’t it?” He didn’t get it. The losing dad obviously implied by the short car ride comment that we lived in the city where the game was held and wanted the home team to win. It was comical that my partner missed that, even though he didn’t miss any calls the whole night. After my partner’s reply, I wonder what the dad thought/said after we were out of earshot.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Referees don’t care which team wins. When we screw up, we deserve to be criticized. When there is a well-played/well-officiated close game, don’t use us as a crutch.

From the November edition of the Minnesota Youth Athletic Services newsletter. MYAS is the governing body that oversees most of the youth basketball tournaments in Minnesota. MYAS Executive Director Dan Klinkhammer wrote:

“We have a local basketball referee - Derek Wolden - who has authored a book entitled “BasketCases.” He does a great job of showing how youth basketball parents can lower their blood pressure and keep their sanity. I read the book white sitting in my deer stand during deer hunting and the entire time I kept thinking, “Why didn’t somebody write this sooner. This book should be required reading for every coach and parent before their kids hit the court. Wolden does a great job explaining the rules and, more importantly, he explains how and why officials administer the rules the way they do. If making “BasketCases required reading for your coaches and parents will make a more enjoyable and understandable season, then do it.”

I couldn’t agree more with Dan’s last sentence. 

We expect issues like abortion, gun control, smoking bans and gay marriage to polarize America. I never thought a high school girls’ varsity basketball game could join this short list of divisive hot button issues.

For the couple of weeks, the talk of Texas – and much of the nation – is the reaction to The Covenant School defeating Dallas Academy 100-0 in a matchup of two Dallas-area Christian schools. This story endured several news cycles because:

·          The Covenant School apologized a week after the game, calling its 100-point victory “shameful and “an embarrassment,” and offered to forfeit the victory

·         Micah Grimes, Covenant’s head coach, publicly disagreed with his school’s apology, saying his team played with “honor and integrity”

·         The Covenant School fired Coach Grimes within hours of his public statement

Reading message boards about this game has been fascinating. Not surprisingly, many Americans balked at Coach Grimes’ lack of sportsmanship and suggested that he should be fired (before he actually was). What was surprising – and frankly somewhat scary – was the vast majority of message board authors wholeheartedly believe that a team should score as many points as possible and never let up.

Everyone tried to place blame. The winning coach should be fired for his lack of class and sportsmanship. The losing coach should be fired for fielding such an awful squad. The athletic directors should be fired for scheduling the game. The only group to survive the daggers in this debate was the officials, who enjoyed a rare exemption from a controversial sports outcome.

Before I offer some much-needed common sense to this debate, let me provide some perspective as a veteran basketball official. First of all, lopsided basketball scores happen more often than you think. Check the sports pages of any newspaper. Some private schools focus on teaching academics and/or religious beliefs. Basketball is simply a relatively inexpensive extracurricular activity they can offer to their students to supplement the high school experience. These schools have no feeder programs, and some of the student-athletes have never played basketball before.

A couple of years ago, I officiated a lopsided 94-5 game between two small Christian schools in Minnesota that didn’t make any headlines. Before you assume the winning coach “ran up the score,” I can tell you firsthand he didn’t. He called off the press after a 20-some-point lead, didn’t play his starters the second half and instructed his bench players to sit in a zone and not steal the ball on every possession.

This year, the Minnesota State High School League, adopted a “mercy rule” for varsity basketball games, which is consistent with rules in most other sports. The new rule states that if one team is leading by 35 or more points, the clock will move to “running time” for the last nine minutes of the game. Look for other states to consider adopting a similar rule in the wake of Covenant’s victory.

This hollow 100-donut game – and the reaction to it – begs for some common-sense conclusions:

·         Did Coach Grimes run up the score? Of course he did. Once Covenant reached 100 points, it decided not to score during the final four minutes of the game. He obviously wanted to score triple figures and obtained his goal.

·         Should Coach Grimes have been fired for the 100-0 victory? No, a good athletic director would have questioned his judgment and used it as a teaching opportunity. (Publicly disagreeing with the school through the media is a different issue, however)

·         Should Covenant forfeit the victory? No, that is simply a damage-control olive branch that doesn’t make sense and punishes the players

·         Does the coach of the losing team have some culpability for not having his players ready to play? I think so. Even players with minimal talent or athletic ability can improve with proper coaching, practice and repetition.

America remains polarized about this game. It’s a classic – and thankfully competitive – match-up between the pro-sportsmanship faction appalled by Coach Grimes’ behavior and the win-at-all-costs mob that has zero sympathy for the losing team and believes political correctness has gone too far. There is some common ground here. If this game ended 98-2, it never would have become a large national story, and Coach Grimes would not be out of work.

Too often, we fail to recognize and acknowledge that school sporting events are simply an extension of the classroom. Sports are a great opportunity to teach participants about hustle, determination, teamwork, getting along with others, perseverance, appropriate behavior, losing with dignity and the much-need lesson absent in this game: winning with class. Fortunately, those lessons last a lifetime, long after the clock runs out and the scoreboard is unplugged. Unfortunately, the people who could benefit the most from these lessons are adults who act like juveniles.

I apologize for my tardiness updating this blog. I have been officiating most nights, so I have been blowing my whistle instead of blogging about basketball. A few items that have been on my mind:

* I worked some men’s league games tonight for the first time this year, and sure enough, we had to throw out one guy for throwing another player to the floor. Gotta love men’s league. For the most part the guys I officiate are great, but every once in awhile you run into issue. Tonight was one of those.

* I worked a high school game recently in which one of the coaches said two phrases multiple times: Over the back and three seconds in the lane. That coach needs to read BasketCases immediately.

* I worked a couple of youth tournaments recently. One coach had the words box out written on her t-shirt. Thought that was interesting. I had an issue with a fellow referee, who didn’t like the fact that I suggested he pick a different ball to use in a game. The ball didn’t bounce enough and it was fifth grade girls. If we would have used that ball, we would have had 30 jump balls in the game. I think we only had four or five. He got very defensive. Never worked with him before. Don’t want to work with him again. Like I write in BasketCases, you never know what you are going to get with a partner.

* If your schools run multiple courts during weekend tournaments without a tarp or chairs to spearate them, be careful. I was working a high school game at the Breakdown holiday tournament in St. Cloud. Before our varsity game, they were running JV games on adjacent courts. A player from one court saved the ball and threw it over his head back into play. Unfortunately his momentum, carried him into the other court, where he ran into a player, hit the ground and cut his head open, requiring several stitches. I’ve seen some near misses over the years, but this was bad. They ended up calling at least one of those game midway through the fourth quarter.

* I got a nice message from a high school friend named Kirk Fischer who is the assistant coach of his son’s team in Eagan. He wrote: “Got it, and it is already awesome!  We brought it with us to the tourney in Andover yesterday, and we all got a bunch of laughs (and learned a few things)!  Great book - we already said we will recommend it to friends or give it as gifts. Thanks again for the signed copy!”

* Mike McFeely, a columnist with the Fargo Forum, wrote a column this week about the dwindling number of basketball referees in the Fargo-Moorhead area because of bad parent behavior. Make sure you read it and check out the reader comments. In fact, I may just need to recommend BasketCases as a solution. Here is a link to the column: http://www.inforum.com/event/article/id/228340/

After finishing my games on Sunday, I stopped to briefly watch the game on the adjacent court. The game was tied going into double-overtime, which is known as “sudden death” in most situations with the first team to score the winner. The team that won the ball in double-overtime eventually got the ball into their center. As he was driving the player was bumped slightly in the lane. No foul was called, but it could have been called. After that, it appeared as if the player traveled slightly (no call was made) and then the player shot an 8-footer and made it. Game over.

As the officials left the floor, two parents from the losing team exchanged words with them about the traveling no-call that cost their team the game (which I still would like to look at on tape to verify). Funny, they didn’t say anything about the bump no-call which may have lead to the “travel.” Bottom line: I’m going to assume that this was a great game in which both teams had ample opportunities to win it in regulation or the first overtime. These parents are classic dads who need to read BasketCases. In fact, I will bet the mortgage that those dads told their sons in the car on the way home (if not in the parking lot on the way to the car) that they got screwed over by the officials. They probably didn’t say anything about it being a great game and all the positives that they should have focused on. And this is a tiny example why we have a problem with youth basketball.