On Sunday morning, a highly unusual sports brawl broke out in the Atlanta suburb of Cartersville, where the players and referees of a youth basketball game traded punches for several minutes.
The on-site video from the LakePoint Champions Center complex (courtesy of Brandon Bender) doesn't reveal much of the backstory, outside of tensions between players from the R.A.W. Athletics team (Chicago-based) and the referees escalating into violent kicks and punches thrown.
(Note: This wasn't an AAU-sanctioned game between R.A.W. Athletics and the Houston Raptors. It was technically an open summer-league tournament.)
Peace was eventually restored on the court, but not soon enough to prevent the brawl from going viral with various national blogs.
At this time, it's difficult to concretely determine what sparked the scuffle; however, the video (above) has an up-close view of the referees getting attacked by players on two different occasions, seemingly without provocation.
On the flip side, an outside referee from a different court may have played a role in increasing tensions between the factions, after things had settled down for a few minutes.
After the kerfuffle, the apparent social-media account for R.A.W. Athletics coach Howard Martin posted a message, staunchly defending the players.
"A ref actually walked up on one of our players and attacked him. Everyone tried to break it all up, then the ref’s father (who was working a game on a different court) ran over to our court and rushed our guys..everyone in the gym, the other team and the directors saw everything."
Martin's Twitter response, however, was not well-received by those with video access to the brawl, believing the referees had been intimidated throughout the game, leading up to the various fights.
LakePoint Sports has also posted a Twitter message, regarding Sunday's incident.
"We are disappointed in the incident that occurred this morning at The Association basketball tournament at @LakePointIndoor and are taking the appropriate action with authorities. Behavior like this by any party will not be tolerated."
