Saturday rec follies

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by Mark Padgett

The rec spring league I'm working is a real challenge. That's because they don't recognize any NF uniform rules (except "no jewelry"). We have kids playing with mis-matched jerseys, white T-shirts under dark jerseys, numbers only on the back, etc. One of the teams I had yesterday had two players with no numbers. They were wearing white and the only tape we had was white adhesive. We did put numbers on their jerseys with the tape but we could barely see them. Another team had a kid with a black T-shirt and we couldn't make him number zero because they had an actual number zero on the team. They also had a double zero. One team had a number 100! In one game we had one team with day-glo orange uniforms and the other team wearing bright purple. Oh yeah - they're not required to tuck their jerseys in, either.

Here on the Forum, we often discuss the "foolishness" of NFHS uniform rules, using terms like "Fashion Police". Sounds like what Mark Padgett is describing here is the "Bizzaro World" of NFHS uniform rules, just the opposite of the "real" NFHS rules. Here's a good example of what happens when uniform rules are ignored, or not in place at all. Anarchy reigns, and officiating the game becomes more difficult than it should be.

From this we can draw a lesson from Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean. Virtue consists of finding an appropriate middle ground between two extremes. As such, each virtue has not one opposite but two. The opposite of courage is both cowardice and rashness, for example. This idea that there are two opposites for every virtue goes against much of the received wisdom of Aristotle's time, including Plato's writings on virtue. It also emphasizes the importance of moderation: we achieve virtue by finding a middle ground, not by aiming for an extreme.