Easy now

Sports can be a lot of fun, there are not very many things better in life that competing and succeeding. They can be taken too serious however, especially intramural basketball in my case. Now while my team is not the 96' Bulls, we are not the Detroit Lions of intramural basketball. We got stomped tonight, and it was not fun in the slightest. It was so frustrating, losing by 20 points and having no subs, we were exhausted the entire game. At then end we kind of goofed off and had some fun but overall it was just plain bad. To make matters worse right after the game the referee asked me if I wanted to referee the next game, because no one else was willing to, I soon found out why no one wanted to officiate that game.

The game had way to many personalities on the floor, it was an A-league game between two of the best teams. Which isn't inherently bad, but as the game went on I made a few bad calls and I heard about it the entire game. I was letting a lot of knicky knack fouls go, because that is what teams wanted, but at the same time they got furious when you didn't call something small. It ends up that a fight broke out at one point and I had to give a player a technical foul and talk to him a minute, and that actually cooled things down for the rest of the game and made it run alot smoother. However it wasn't all bad, because I learned a alot about officiating tonight, and gained alot of confidence in my roll as a referee. All of the previous games that I have reffereed have gone well and I have enjoyed several fun and close games.

It is interesting what you can learn in different situations in life, tonight I was talking to a friend after the game and he talked about how we treat people. He said that in sports you can get frustrated with referees and argue with them but at the same time it speaks alot about how you treat people if you are verbally assaulting them, which is really true. It made me think about alot of the things that I say, because I hated having every single decision that I made tonight questioned orally. How we treat people is so evident when face with situations in which we are the most tired, frustrated, mad, or in just a poor situation.

"Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone." - Colossians 4:6

- Josh