Who's a bad ref???

I’m exhausted! Today, I refereed 4 basketball games at the NUPT-NYIT opening ceremony where 8 freshman and sophomore teams competed for the bragging rights as b-ball champions of the campus.  The top freshman team will play the top sophomore team later on in the week for the championship game so I will keep you posted.  As for the refereeing, let’s just say that refs are regarded the same worldwide, or at least in America and China.  NO ONE LIKES YOU! Ha ha ha.  Basically, as a ref you have the inability to see everything on the court and therefore are unable to make every call, especially when you are the only one out there.  I mean when I was playing I didn’t particularly like refs so I don’t blame anyone for thinking otherwise.  Anyways, let’s just say I had a very interesting day from laughing at the players, to becoming very annoyed, to yelling at them, to screaming at them, to almost having to break up a fight.  

The way the teams are divided up is that each class has a team to represent their major.  The slight problem with this it that many of the classes are very female dominant, making the likely hood of finding competitive players in your class slim. (Since none of the girls in the program play basketball)  These were the games I got to referee.  YEAH!  Ok so enough of the sarcasm but seriously it was quite frustrating at times having to ref a game where many of the players had no idea what I was saying and were not understanding that you don’t start arguing whether over a call when your still dribbling the ball!  From my observations today, I don’t think many of the students have played organized basketball before.  Mainly, they play street ball as we would call it.  Between the confusion of elbows, feet, shoelaces and glasses flying everywhere it was actually quite comical and fun.  They were down right serious about winning and their emotions carried through with yelling, pushing and arguing.  Hey just like in America right!?! Some were very talented and knew it; I swear I saw a few Kobe moves with the 3-point pull-ups.  Others seemed like they had never played before today while some seemed to try very hard but just didn’t seem to have the ability or athleticism.  They wanted fouls called for tripping over their own feet and called timeouts when they meant to substitute.  Not to mention that the person doing the clock at one game just decided to leave without telling anyone, leaving me to figure out what the hell to do!  

But in the end, I took today as another cultural difference.  I mean I am used to playing at the college level and being around people that know as much about basketball as I do or much more.  I think we take for granted the things besides education that we learn in school or the opportunity we have to play on teams in public school because many of these students have never gotten the opportunity to.  We grow up on sports and if we aren’t good at them we usually are a fan or at least understand the game or rules.  Many of these students lacked the ability to do this just on the shear reason that they couldn’t because they didn’t have the opportunity to.  So all in all I think interesting would have to be the right word to describe my experience today, seems to be the one word I use quite often since I have been here!