BAYFL differences from Fed?

[Robert Goodman]

American Youth Football specifically doesn't require its affiliates to use a common rules set while playing within their own circuits, though in their out-of-circuit competitions they, like Pop Warner, use a modified version of Fed.

At Saturday's Jr. Pee-Wee game in the Big Apple Youth Football League, K1 was allowed to pick up an otherwise untouched ball lying on the ground beyond R's free kick line, and advance it for a TD. Does anyone happen to know whether BAYFL allows K to advance its own free kick?

(I've seen only one recent USAn rules set that allowed K to advance its own free kick, and then only contradictorily -- the unusably bad IWFL rule book of 2004.)

I have reasons to think the ref was simply wrong. For one, no white hat, cluing me that he didn't have much, if any, ref experience. For another, he seemed to treat the scored-against team badly in other respects, one of which I'll delineate:

At another free kick, the ball was badly hit by the kicker, resulting in its moving only about a foot off the tee, while team R, following the homework handout I'd given them 2 weeks earlier, stayed away from the ball, until K1 took possession of it. Ref didn't whistle and seemed to want to grant a do-over until our head coach complained. At that point the ref presented the options quietly to our captain, who without conferring with any of us took the inferior choice of loss of 5 yards, down repeated. (I never gave them homework on that!) You'd think with kids that young, the ref would at least encourage them to check with their adult mentors on penalty choices rather than taking a bad one.

It's a little hard to look things up in the BAYFL, so I thought maybe one of you would have experience in it, being it's fairly big.

Robert