Sunday, March 04, 2007

Tearing back the curtain

This post will take us off the discussion we have been having about Scripture, but I thought it worth bringing up. I attended a Little League Umpire's Training Session yesterday, mostly by mistake. Anyway, two observations:
1. There are two types of umps: high school guys who like baseball, and middle aged guys who like details and being right. I was stunned to learn that all the stereotypes I secretly held about who umpires are when no one else was arround, were exactly right. Its sort of like the first time I heard a Canadian talk, I thought he was joking.
2. Umpires dislike coaches at least as much as coaches dislike umpires. This is huge for the way I watch sports and interact with umpires. I guess I always knew it had to be true, but they are so blatant about it.

One other observation from yesterday's Badger-Spartan game: I really like Tom Izzo. He coaches the right way as far as I can tell. He works the refs a bit, but for the most part you see him coaching up his own guys. I loved one sequence where an MSU player was called for a traveling violation, the player complained a bit, they flashed to Izzo, and you could clearly see him mouth, "You traveled. Slow down. Slow down." Classy. Also I am glad the Badgers won.

1 comment:

christian said...

i'm also glad that the badgers won. good accidental stuff about the umps. i think coaches could be categorized the same way- i'm a detail-dictator coach. anyway, i started to write my thoughts on ref-coach interaction and i had a post written, so i put it on my blog. hey- if you wrote more than bi-monthly you could carry on more than one conversation at a time..!