Finally, the season started and it's great to be back on the field. I worked three HS games on a Saturday. It was friggin HOT... and the games sucked. I was White Hat for the first game and worked with three people I never worked with before.
This was the first game as a football official for my Line Judge. He later confessed he never even played football. It showed. He clearly does not understand the game.
Nothing really strange happened outside of a 'first touching' that one of the coaches just could not fathom. Understanding the depths of first touching is not unusual for a freshman coach. Or varsity for that matter.
In the Var game, the losing coach came unglued when there was a fumble forward on a punt return. He was screaming that you could not fumble forward and advance. We politely reminded the coach that although we were playing on Sat., we are still using Friday night rules. This team is on its 12th straight loss.
I did go to the college game and worked with the Umpire. He gave me a lot of good advice, tips, etc I'll share as the season goes along. The game was 48-7 at the half and the first half took 2:00 hours. It was a incomplete passing-fest, scoring-fest(at least for one team), penalty-fest, and lets-not-run-the-clock-fest.
