Quest to Ref (2002) Online

This little short may have entertained some people but I wish the writer and director would have spend sometime getting the technical aspects of basketball officiating correct. Yes, I'm a ref at the high school level so I was bothered by some of the small things that an individual so dedicated to the calling would have never done.

While being one with the whistle may be important to our protagonist - it was the wrong one. Trained officials call basketball games with a plastic Fox/40 pea-less whistle not silver metal one with a little ball inside. His mechanics (how he demonstrates his calls) for a player control foul would never have been used by an NBA ref. While the immediate signal for a charge is used sometimes at the high school level, it's not an authorized one. Evaluators would consider that a negative mark against the applicant.

On the other hand, there are a small number of fledgling officials who exhibit the same attitudes about calling the game and how they live their lives. I wish they would find a different ad vocation. Not only do they make the players miserable, they're always a pain to work with. Plus they usually exhibit the `Billy Graham' syndrome. (What does a basketball official and Bill Graham have in common? They both can make a stadium crowd of 20,000 jump to their feet and scream `Jesus!')

Anyway, this is not a movie I would recommend to my fellow officials but anyone who thinks sports officials are a bunch of jerks will love this film.

It might be easy to just see this as a basketball/referee film, but it is much more. Not being a basketball ref or even a fan (though I put in my 8 years during high school and college), I looked at what, I felt, the makers were trying to convey and not at the technicalities of the game. I saw a film that said it was not only fine to persevere at what a person loves, but it was also fine to be a little crazy about it.