Quote:
Originally Posted by bisonlj
It does surprise me a little how some places only use one ball and chase it all over the field. Every team has multiple balls and finding the 14-year old son of a coach doesn't seem to be too big of a problem here. Some teams will also use an injured player or manager.
If you have historically only used one ball it wouldn't be too hard for the state to mandate schools provide at least 2 or 3 as well as a ball boy. They can definitely use this new rule as a reason. When we experimented they made it optional for us to have balls for both teams on both sides. With the exception of a couple weeks that's what we've done the past 3 years. Occasionally we'll have a visiting team request to place an extra ball boy on the home team side (all change of possession come in from the home side for efficiency) and we are fine with that if they are. It hasn't been a problem.
People keep saying this was a solution in search of a problem. If you consistently can't get the ball ready for play in 25 seconds because you are chasing down footballs, then it was more of a problem than I realized.
I don't know if any of the experimental states were ones where only one ball was used by each team. That should never have happened in the first place and can be easily fixed now.
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I said this to you before. The issue is not if we can get the ball in place at 25 seconds, the issue is that there is not a mechanism to make that happen consistently. If the ball is thrown literally to the track or to the fence in a high school field, then it is an issue if we have started the clock as stated and we have no other help to retrieve the ball in a timely manner. Is that every play? Nope. But it happens enough that this was a serious concern at a couple of meetings I attended.
And none of this solves anything if there is no policy in place to solve obvious hole that was never considered. Again, this rule was a solution looking for a problem. There was nothing needed for this rule because it does not make the game better or even go faster. We still have no play clocks at most fields and we still have no policy for having different balls at least in this state. BTW, the only time we have a coach check different balls is when they think they get a "kicking ball." Otherwise, we get one, sometimes two that they bring to us, but again the same issue is at play. It is one kid or their side of the field that often is not paying attention to the game anyway. We cannot get ball boys in college to pay attention, but we are relying on a one ball boy that often does not know to bring the ball in after an obvious change of possession.
We will work with it and it is going to take some penalties for some coaches to have the light bulb go on or the IHSA to realize we have serious holes, but I am just going to laugh until the fallout.
Peace