Tuesday, September 14, 2010

A Code For The Whole Family

The tennis family from Hell.

As we travel around the tennis officiating world we always hear some great stories--and here is a good one...

Seems that one of our newer officials was standing between two courts of teenage girls as they battled for the prizes--and one of the fathers got involved. The Dad proceeded to come out onto the court and tell the official that if he didn't code the girl his daughter was playing that he would "turn him in" and then began shouting and pointing his finger in the official's face.

At that point the official told the father to leave the court and if he didn't behave that he would "code the whole family"!!! I thought this was a great statement but when we realized there were 6 members of the family, all kind of ramifications began to pop into my head...

The way I see it, there were these options for our well-meaning official:

1. Code each family member with a point penalty which would mean a 6 point code.

2. Do a point, game, default penalty to three of the family members and then give another set of point, game, and default.

3. Realize that he really can't code the whole family and call for the police to come remove them from the site.

4. Play like it never happened and move on to some other courts--hoping that the father would leave him alone.

Which of the four options do you think is best???

2 comments:

fsrainh2o said...

If it doesn't cool down fast, call security and have them removed from the site. Traumatic, yes, especially for the player and tournament but some folks just don't understand how to behave. Make sure if codable behavior is going on, it gets taken care of before this level.

AR Hacked Off said...

haha had the situation last tournament, called code on player for taunting, player goes nuts, dad goes nuts, referee comes to court, upholds penalty and was ready to issue another code if dad did not shut it.