How's this for a pre-game meeting?

[Mark Padgett]

Went to work three HS games for spring league today. Prior to my games, there was a meeting of all the refs with a coordinator from the league. He went over the rules which, at first, were the same as the past few years there, i.e.: 22 minute running halves, two 30s per half, extra two points plus shots and possession for unsportsmanlike technicals. However, he surprised the group when he got to the point of discussing uniforms. We were directed to allow virtually anything except something that would be a safety issue.

He told us to ignore non-compliant T-shirts, illegal numbers and other similar items. In fact, he said he knew some of the teams might not ever have numbers and we were just to ask players for their names when we called fouls. He also said he didn't even care if a team's jerseys all matched, as long as one team was wearing "generally dark and the other generally light" - and that's a direct quote. He said kids could wear wrist bands anywhere on their arm and also shooting sleeves.

He was certainly right about the jerseys. One team I had displayed about half of their shirts with numbers on the front only and half with numbers on the back only. Another team had three players with white T-shirts and no numbers. Another wore varying shades of green ranging from forest to lime. One kid didn't have a number but had the words "Robby Stopper" written with marker on the back of his T-shirt. Apparently, he knew some kid named Robby on the other team. In my first game, one of the teams started three kids with red jerseys, one with purple and one with black.

The good news was that we didn't care if we had to take extra time to identify who committed a foul, because we had a running clock.

BTW - one team had a kid who was 6'11" (the scorer was his dad and he told us how tall the kid was) and his team didn't run even one post play for him the entire game. He wound up with 8 points, almost all on offensive rebounds and his team lost by 15.

MS games tomorrow. I wonder what those kids will be wearing?