The kid is back.
Okay, so I just completed a quadruple header of high school basketball games. Four in one night. It wouldn't be so bad, but I was actually broadcasting the games. The first two went smoothly. No major hitches or glitches. Things were rolling along, names were flying off my tongue, and the play by play was sliding along like an ice skater. I even had my spots timed out perfectly so that we had not a lot of dead air. Life was good.Then life turned bad.
Real bad.
First of all, my statistician had to leave. Not that big of deal, because we had a plan. My father came to take Jake's place as my statistician. Perfect. Only problem was, he hammered out the lineups for me. Oops. Now it was a little chaotic as he had scribbled down all the names on the program instead of putting down just the starters and then adding the rest as they came in. I thought okay, I can make this work. The second problem of the evening was that the HOME team's girl's numbers were incorrect. Next thing I know, we're trying to get them corrected. Problem two avoided.
The game tipped off and we were about 45 seconds into the action. No one had scored yet and I glanced at the clock to see how much time had elasped. Imagine my surprise as I saw the clock was stuck on :49 seconds. No buzzer, no clock, no score. The refs stopped play and then they tried to figure it out. I took a 30 second timeout, hoping that they could get the problem straightened out.
Of course they couldn't.
Someone went and grabbed one of those old fashioned flip scoreboards. So for the first quarter and half of the second I had only the flip scoreboard to work with and I had to guess as to how much time was left. It didn't help any when the scorekeeper fell behind. I wasn't exactly fond of life at the time. Finally, they got everything straightened out and life was good once again.
posted by Rusty @ 9:49 PM
Comments: 0
