A Hypervigilant or Safety Conscious Ref?

[BoomerSooner]

There may be variation between rule sets, but under FED rules, if you felt "wearing" the mouth guard in this manner "is dangerous or confusing to other players or is not appropriate", you should not allow any team member to "wear" the equipment (3-5-1). Rule 3-7 also allows you to not permit any player to participate if in your judgement any item constitutes as safety concern.

If safety was your concern, then your action is supported by rule. With that in mind, I qualified my statement for 2 reasons. The first is that I detected a sense of distaste for "pseudo-Steph" in your description of the situation. The second reason is that you don't mention safety until the end of the post, which suggested to me that you are using that as a reason to justify the action you took.

I'm just trying to provide honest feedback, so if I'm off base with this, I apologize, but my honest interpretation of the situation as I read it was that you didn't care for his cockiness or some other aspect of his play and that was the reason you pressed the issue. If that is the case, then I would make the case that the rules don't support your initial request for him to "wear" the mouth guard properly. The technical foul could be supported on the basis of the players failure to follow the instruction of an official, although the debate on this point is that the rule does instruct the official to not allow a player to participate with equipment that is dangerous, and thus the proper action would could be to require the player to leave the game until his equipment conforms to the rules.

And in conclusion, since you ask how we would have handled the situation, I'll let you know that I would have required the player to put the mouth guard in properly explaining to him that it presents a potential choking hazard when not used properly and made sure his coach was aware of the situation. The benefit of not working Adult/Wreck games is that HS coaches will typically take care of the issue because they don't want to deal with the headache of it coming up again later in the game. If I did subsequently notice it again, I would stop play and notify his coach that the player has to be removed from the game until the equipment situation was corrected.