I've driven my car 300,000 miles and I've never been in an accident. Should I stop wearing my seat belt?

The risk for injury seems obvious. The number of games you've done without such injury seems irrelevant. If someone reported an incident of injury, would your stance change?

Have you ever seen a player injured because of a lace? Have you ever heard of a case?

A player could become injured by a draw string being outside of the shorts too, are you going to stop the game to tuck it in?

A player's shorts could fall down and trip them up, are you going to stop a game to tell them to pull them up?

If it does not present a realistic danger, there is no reason to stop the game. The player can tie their shoe WITHOUT us stopping the game.

Stuff happens.

Shoes coming off, laces loose, something on the floor, blah blah blah.

There is a certain line where we must play on - expensive and potentially dangerous glasses/contacts are completely different than shoes/laces coming off.

I seriously doubt most coaches would approve of you blowing a play dead because some kid didn't do his shoes up well enough.

How often does it happen, once a year? What's the harm? I'm talking about a non-scoring position.

It happens in almost EVERY game below varsity in HS that I do. Many of the shoes have the rope-like laces that don't tie well, unless they are in double knots.

The AI Reeboks were the worst shoe I EVER saw, I'd have kids having to tie them 5 or 6 times a game.

Like I said wait for a whistle and say get your laces and have EVERY player check their's, while you are at it.

It's my experience that the majority of serious injuries happen during a "loose ball" - twisted ankles and elbows to the head during rebounding action, pile ons and skid marks diving on the floor, people diving over tables into the first row to prevent an OOB, etc. And this happens much much more frequently than a shoe coming undone.

From now on in the name of safety I'm stopping play as soon as team control ends.

If you've driven your car 300,000 miles and you've never been in an accident and you've never seen one and you've never met anybody that's been in one or seen one, nor have you ever heard of one happening, then you're probably okay.