Article on ESPN.com

[Back In The Saddle]

Originally posted by oc
I coach CC and from my experience it isn't practical to check all the kids before the race. BBall games have 10 players at at time. CC races can have a 100 kids or more in the same race. In my league after one race finishes we start the next race ASAP. Line the kids up and go. There isn't time to check for jewelry. The coaches know the rule, and (according to the article) both the coaches and the runners were warned about the rule. What's left? Enforce the rule.

26. There were 26 runners disqualified. The article is short on details, so let's just take a wild, hypothetical stab at the numbers. Say we have just one race with 100 runners. That's roughly 25 percent of the participants. Say we have five races of 100 runners. That's still five percent.

Perhaps between five and 25 percent of the participants were each wearing those bright yellow bracelets that catch my eye every day of the week. It seems that they were obvious enough to somebody somewhere that 26 individual competitors could be identified and disqualified.

You make a valid point about basketball. And I can't say that even in basketball--where I'm on a relatively small floor, with a small number of players, for an hour or more--that I catch everything. But if an evaluator were to observe me missing five to 25 percent of the players wearing jewelry, I may as well cancel my phone service because the assigners will simply stop calling.

BTW, I have no qualms with your conclusion. There was nothing left; they enforced the rule as written. But really, if not a single official noticed this large number of participants wearing the bands in time to say something to the kids or coaches--at any point during the entire meet--I can only draw one conclusion about the officiating. The officials were just not paying enough attention.

Let me say this as well, I opined earlier that it had never occured to me to consider these bands jewelry (by which I did not mean to imply that I didn't consider them a safety issue). Apparently several coaches and 26 runners didn't consider them jewelry either, so much so that there didn't appear to be any "what about yellow bands?" type questions asked. Nor does it appear that any specific mention of them was made by the race officials in any of these pre-race meetings. Even though the bands have been popular for a while now.

Perhaps they should be judged guilty on two counts of negligence for not practicing preventive officiating.