Quote:
Originally Posted by bisonlj
I am anxious to hear about your implementation. I have several officiating friends in your area so I'll see if their experiences are similar to yours. I would imagine they will be.
I guarantee each of your teams have multiple balls they can check. They choose not to or have never been asked to. I think that's fairly rare around the country but these forums have proven it's more common than I would have expected. Our poorest inner city schools have at least 2 or 3 balls. They may not be great footballs, but they have multiple and have no problem checking them.
I wish you the best of luck!
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I'm not worried about this rule. I will be fine with what we do because what we have will be based on what the schools provide or what they accept. Just like when I was a baseball umpire, we had only so many balls the schools would provide, so we dealt with their limitations. And in many cases, the schools would complain about how many balls they had, but they choose to provide only a small amount of baseballs that were actually needed.
Providing balls is not going to be the issue. They could provide 10 balls per team, but what are you going to do when you have no system in place to figure out when to bring in the next ball? If you only keep your footballs on your side of the field and you have no system to chase the ball, that is going to be the rub. You could have all your footballs sitting on your opponent's sideline at some point and no ball boy system to make this run easier. This to me is like having a shot clock in basketball, but you do not put the shot clock on the basket, but it is on a stopwatch. You have caused issues that you would not have had normally. And what you will find is that there will be no one size fits all situation. I have already had this conversation with a couple of assignors and they have to try to convince their schools to do simple things that we do automatically at the college level. It is just going to be funny when the season starts.
Also, most scrimmages here will not be with an actual clock or an actual game-like situation. Scrimmages here are often run by the schools that decide they will run plays at their pace or how they wish to run. Scrimmages will not be a place things will be ironed out on this front. Week 1 will be the actual testing ground.
Peace