Book Situation

[johnny d]

Originally Posted by Nevadaref

Forget any unscrupulous behavior. Just consider the situation in which the visiting team properly submitted a copy of its roster to the official scorer and that person made an honest mistake when transferring the information to the official book (perhaps he skipped a team member or got two numbers reversed). Let's further stipulate that the scorer even admits the mistake was his.

Your stance is that this team must now be penalized for something completely beyond its control because that is how that one rule reads. In my opinion that is very poor judgment for a referee.

You are failing to understand that the NFHS rule for scorebook changes presupposes that the team followed the submission requirement and that nothing else irregular took place, such as a screw up by the scorer. The rules function in conjunction with each other, not in isolation.

Lastly, the NFHS rules book contains a statement near the beginning about the importance of understanding the intent and purpose of the rules so that they may be intelligently applied. Penalizing a team for the mistake of someone not even associated with the team would not be in accordance with that.

I never said I would give a technical foul when the submitted roster was correct and a book keeping error occurred. I was arguing that because of the poor wording of the way the rule is written, especially when compared to the wording of the NCAA-M rule, which clearly lists a book keeping mistake as an exception to the technical foul penalty, a case could be made that a technical foul is supported by the rule.

In fact, I had this very situation in a HS game I did last season. The visiting team submitted their correct roster and the score keeper made a mistake transcribing it. When they discovered the error in the book, they notified us. I went to the table, asked for the roster submitted by the visiting team, verified it had the correct info and that it was submitted on time. I told the score keeper to put the player in the book without penalty. Home coach was adamant it was the wrong decision. I told him that if he looks at the rule more carefully, he will see that it states names cannot be added to the team member list, which hasn't occurred, not the score book, which is subject to book keeping errors by his score keeper. He didn't like that explanation and he even called the assignor and complained about it afterwards. The assignor told him he was wrong, the rule isn't meant to punish the other team when the mistake was made by a member from the other school. He didn't like that explanation either. Too bad for him.