Clark Kellogg is THE MAN!

I know I don't talk about this a whole lot, but I've reffed WAYYYY too many games over the past 10 summers or so. I'm sure that I'll have multiple reffing posts over the next few months, but I gotta post my first one based on a game that I didthis past weekend.
I was in Fort Wayne reffing a Run N Slam tournament, which are sponsored by the Spiece Fieldhouse. The Spiece is an 8-court mega gym in Fort Wayne which also has a great AAU program for boys and girls in Fort Wayne as well as in Indianapolis.
Generally speaking, the teams in the Spiece-related tourneys are approximately 4,123 times better than in any AYBT tourney, largely because the Spiece tourneys get AAU teams from across the country--in fact, I did 25 games this weekend in age groups from 6th to 11th graders and reffed teams from Wisconsin, Florida, Utah, and Iowa. Now, I'm not going to say whether or not a bunch of Utah 8th grade kids need to play in a tournament in Indiana, or why their parents think that's a good idea--not my kid, so I guess they can do what they want with their money.
The game I'll talk about was a game involving 9th graders between C-BIZ. a group of kids from the Columbus, OH area, and Indiana Elite, a NW Indiana AAU club's offshoot branch in the Fort Wayne area. The Elite team had a 6-7 lefty named DeShawn Thomas, who is rated as a top-3 freshman IN THE COUNTRY and has already been offered from a number of D-I's, including Ohio State. He is a flat-out stud with an advanced offensive game, but didn't defend very well in this game.
Elite's coach ended up being one of the classic overcoaching AAU screamers, and Thomas complained about EVERY call. My partner T'd the Elite's coach up (we were playing by HS rules), which meant he had to sit down the rest of the game. Of course he had never heard of the rule and thought we were making it up, because we have nothing better to do with our weekends than torture mediocre AAU coaches.
And needless to say, the Elite's parents were screaming fools. In fact, they actually have a reputation ALREADY as 9th grade parents as a group that has to be dealt with, so our site supervisor was lucky enough to sit in the stands and deal with their tired act all game long as well. I'll deal with this at length in a later post, but I simply don't understand why parents like that don't get the fact that the more they yell about EVERY SINGLE PLAY, the more their coach gets worked up, and the more their kids get worked up. To illustrate that fact, after the Elite's coach got T'd, he was quiet for roughly 10 minutes, just long enough for his kids to go on about a 20-4 run during which they just pounded the C-BIZ.
Well, Elite won the game by 5 or 6 points. Directly before the next game started, I see a large gentleman walking out of the stands toward me. At this point in the day, usually its a parent ready to direct their misplaced anger and ignorance toward the ref who made his kids' team miss all their free throws and layups.
But in a COMPLETE surprise, it ends up being CBS college basketball expert Clark Kellogg! His son played on the C-BIZ team, and completely unprompted, he came out of the stands to tell Ryan (my partner) and I how great a job we did in handling the game. His direct quote, "If I say something to anyone in the stands or at the event about the other team's parents, it's just like pouring gasoline on the fire."
It was my own personal One Shining Moment during a weekend of forgettable ones. Clark Kellogg is now my new favorite college basketball studio analyst.