[JRutledge]

I can tell you with great confidence that most officials in Illinois that work the Boy's 3A or 4A players at the Sectional level are not "college officials." Knowing many of them personally in this area for sure, most work almost no college at all. And most lower level college officials work some level of high school in their schedule.

Also what kind of bothers me is when people make the claim about what is appropriate for "high school." The game is essentially the same. Actually I find that college officials call more than a high school only official because we have more philosophies that are followed for things to be called. I hear more high school officials trying to justify not calling "hand checking" than I ever hear a college official do. At the college level if you attend camps of any kind and listen to the NCAA tapes, there are many things they want us to call and "absolutes" are one of those reasons.

Most of all when the teams get to this level of the playoff, these are the good teams or teams that deserve to get to that level most often. So you might have teams being able to play through some contact that will not happen during the regular season. Kind of like was said, "This is big boy basketball" now. That being said if anyone would have come to my game on Tuesday, we called a lot of fouls to the point we were it the double bonus for at least one team both halves. And two of us were college officials. A lot of what you call is totally dictated by the teams you have. Heck if the put the ball on the hole most of the time we do not have to call fouls at all.

Peace