Scrimmages

[ilyazhito]

On the one hand, I understand why teams pay less for scrimmages (or even nothing) than real games. It's a dress rehearsal for the regular season games they will later play.

On the other hand, it is really annoying how unseriously teams take the officials at scrimmages. They expect the officials to just go along with whatever they want, when it's not that way in the regular season. The thing that really grinds my gears is the non-standard rules many scrimmages are played by. Deleting the score, resetting fouls at the quarters, and in one private school scrimmage I did a few days ago, an automatic bonus situation with 45 seconds left in each period. All this nonsense makes it difficult to figure out what is actually in play and what isn't, not to mention the irregular uniforms making it difficult to identify players. I appreciate working a scrimmage or two to get practice, but not when you're required to do them for free. Maybe offer some incentive (i.e. have the scrimmages serve as an extra training/evaluation opportunity).