hand checking

[Mountaineer]

On the other side of the coin - as a former coach of 15 years - I always taught my kids two things - 1) to hand check 2) to reach. Nothing blatant, but during drills you'd hear me yelling "reach on purpose" and "hands on". Before I get castigated for teaching kids to break the rules - the reason it to teach over aggressivness. It's teaching them the limits - it's the officials job to see that they obey the rules or penalize them according to the rules. What I have found is most officials will call it between 3 and 6 times and then they become accustomed to it and stop calling it. My teams were always known as teams that played defense very hard and aggressive rather than a team that reached and hand-checked.

Now that I'm an official - knowing how I was - I wear my whistle out on it! LOL