Pre-game Convo With Parent

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by psujaye

He's played 18 games with it on, are you saying the other 36 officials were wrong? I don't know what the other 36 officials did. I know he can't play this game tonight with the brace on.

I hate it when this happens. It makes me look overly officious. I wish that the officials who worked previous to me would go by the rules, and not make exceptions, or their own rules.

A few seasons ago, I had a girl, a star, a Division I bound player, warming up in a mid-January game, with a multicolored headband on. I told her that she couldn't play with a multicolored headband. A minute later, the head coach is approaching me at my pregame position on the opposite side of the table, telling me that this is the first time she has been asked about the headband all season, at this point probably eight, to ten, games into the season.

Last season, in a conference tournament game, I had a girl wearing a purple headband, her school color, at a home game, wearing white uniforms. When I told her that she couldn't wear a purple headband with a white jersey, she told me that she had worn it all season, at this point, she had probably played ten home games.

Last week, I had a game in which all, I mean all, of the visiting players, were wearing medium sleeve white T-shirts under their red jerseys. This was probably their sixth, or seventh, road game. My partner, the referee, allowed them to play with the white T-shirts, because the girls hadn't shaved their armpits, and didn't want to play without their T-shirts.

In all cases, I felt that it was me, not the previous officials, or my partner, who was wrong for being too officious. If all officials would enforce the rules on equipment, and uniforms, early in the season, things like this wouldn't happen. I don't like being the fashion police, but it's in the rules, and these rules, unlike some others, are easy to understand. Wearing the correct color T-shirt, or headband, is an easy rule to understand, not like calling a bang-bang block/charge, or a travel after a "weird" jump stop.