by basketball9 » Wed Feb 22, 2012 9:10 pm
you guys make it seem like the players get to choose who their referees are for their home games. clearly that's not the case. wahpeton is a small town, so obviously there aren't a whole lot of officials to choose from...this forces them to bring in officials that are from other towns. last night against red river i know for a fact that two of the officials live in fargo (Todd Riggs and Jeremy Carney) so saying that they constantly have "hometown refs" is just a common excuse. i've seen poor officiating in basically every school in the EDC and if you think wahpeton has hometown refs go go devils lake...i've seen more than one game where an official's last name is Mertens...there was also a player with the same last name playing for DL in that game. hmm...
also, every team plays better on their home floor and wahpeton is no exception. they've played very poorly this season on the road, but have still stayed close in most of their away games. their only two losses over 10 points this year were in red river by 15 points and grand forks central by 12 and that was by far their worst overall game of the season.
getting back to the red river game- wahp had 22 turnovers to RR's 16...RR must have failed to capitalize on those opportunities. free throws killed the riders as arvidson struggled from the line in the closing minutes and kroeplin missed a final free throw to allow wahp to win on a buzzer beater. total fouls were 16 to 16 in a very physical game...officials don't like to have to blow their whistle every 20 seconds to stop the game. they want the kids to play their game, and that's what it looked like to me. red river got their typical 38 points from arvidson and kroeplin and 10 from burris but nobody else stepped up and did much.
red river attempted more shots (2pt and 3pt), attempted more free throws, had more assists, had more steals, had more blocks, had less turnovers, and the same amount of fouls. if you take that into consideration i'm not sure how you can say the officials won the game for wahpeton...looks like red river missed alot of opportunities, because they definitely had them.