Carlton Supporters Club

The CEO of Basketball Victoria has been punished for an altercation with at least one referee at his daughter’s under-12s game at Box Hill.

3AW’s Rumour File has confirmed a tribunal found Nick Honey guilty of bringing the game into disrepute, gross breach of code, and avoidable contact with an official.

He has been ordered to serve an eight-week ban for the incident in February and remains CEO while serving his suspensio

Firstly, I'm no fan of basketball, as a professional sport it's a game designed around advertising.

I've heard some rumors about this seasons junior finals series that are outrageous, the refs seem to have lost the plot.

I think I posted about one such incident a few weeks back in which an Unders team ended up with just 2 players on the court before half-time after a series of crazy technical fouls being called by refs on children as young as 11. Some of the kids were asked to leave the stadium due to repeat technical fouls, fouls that most adult players would struggle to understand and you would need a video replay to analyse!

In one incident a coach was fouled/banned from the stadium because after having only two players left he pulled his U12 team off the court! The refs expected his team to continue a grand final with only two players, no bench and no coach!

I suspect someone high up has had their kid spurned by BV and is seeking technical revenge across the entire competition because it seems like a system wide fever has hit the referees!

That is fanciful LP.

That is fanciful LP.

In this case it wasn’t a final, there were no technical fouls, both teams finished with all their players and the officials, by virtue of their ages, have no children spurned by BV.  In fact, BV has very little to do with junior basketball, apart from setting the rules framework that the officials were trying to implement.

It’s probably relevant that the officials were women - actually two women and a girl.  I suspect that Honey would have been more circumspect if my 200cm son was reffing.

Yep basketball is political and inbred but not at domestic level so much, less so in the womens comp and not until the U16's and playing rep.....domestic refs are usually players with the home club making some pocket money or have some other family/club connection. Its usually the coaches that get thrown out rather than players at that level....

Most of the games were lower level regional stuff out Knox/Dandenong or down on the Peninsula. But one of the games was a Melb Tigers associated U12 team I believe in at MSAC or one of the city venues, it's also being investigated as there is apparently stadium video available!

My main concern EB1 is we are talking about children, kids who should be encouraged to participate, kids who can barely run without tripping themselves over let alone deal with the technical vaguery of a very complicated sport. One of the parents reports their 10 yo was playing up a level, primarily due to his size, and was ejected from the GF stadium for a two technical fouls!

In another game the refs ended up in an argument with a coach because they fouled so many kids the game stopped when the team was down to one player. The refs wanted the coach to bring a kid sitting on the bench back on to allow the game to continue and when the coach refused he was ejected, the kid it turned out was nursing an injured arm on the bench watching out his teams GF, scans later showed he had a fracture! The ref allegedly later said at a post match investigation that if he'd known the kid remaining on the bench had a fractured arm he would not have called the other penalties, wtf! This was also a lower level U12 match!

Is this the ugly parent syndrome, the reach of NBA money into junior sport, people ensuring certain kids get all the opportunity!

As an aside.
A weekend ago our local football team had an interesting scenario. You may know the weather was atrocious, some games were abandoned because of hail, high winds and debris on grounds. They have a kid, U19 200cm, an above average KPF but not really AFL draftable level, who can kick drop punts 70m+ with monotonous regularity. He's having shots at goal from inside the center square most weeks and dobbing a good percentage of them in Rocca style. He's been spotted by an NFL recruiter and signed up for a scholarship starting later this year, when the bad weather hit he got a phone call to withdraw from the team because the conditions were too dangerous! The recruiter/manager rang from the USA, wtf!!! At local level the kid is one of those players that is the difference between a win and a loss, he wanted to play, his team wanted him to play, who told the manager in the middle of the US night?