McCatty: Refs to blame for basketball foul up

Veteran basketball official, Howard McCatty, has agreed with the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association's (ISSA) competition's director, George Forbes, that the referees are to blame for the incident which forced game one of the ISSA Southern Conference under-19 basketball final to be ruled null and void and ordered replayed.

McCatty, a former basketball president and currently a referees' trainer and technical commissioner, said the match officials erred by not ensuring that the teams were checked, even though others are sometimes assigned to fulfil this task.

"They (referees) should have checked the identification cards before the game started. But, here in Kingston, we usually have someone checking it, and they (refs) thought it was checked by the table," he explained.

CHECKING ID'S

"But I would put the blame on the referees because a technical commissioner should be at the table to check all IDs. In Northern (Conference), I check all IDs before the games starts," he added.

Calabar won game one of the series, only for Camperdown to launch a protest against their opponents for not having their IDs available for the game.

However, ISSA investigations revealed that Calabar had no IDs. Camperdown did not have their full complement either and, as a result, a replay was ordered. Forbes blamed the match officials for not upholding the rules.

"Our rules are quite simple, and that is you must have an ISSA-issued ID. The referees are the ones causing the problem. How do they know that a player has an ID? If I am the referee and I know you and I say you can play, that does not mean you satisfy the criteria," Forbes said recently.

McCatty admitted that sometimes schools have ID issues when they come to games, and insists that once it can be verified that a player is legitimate, they try to accommodate the schools as best as they can. However, he says next season, there will be no room for such leniency with the regulations.