Using flip boards to call no huddle-Legal?
 

http://soccer.epicsports.com/images/...sports/j30.jpg


SECTION 6 COACHES FIELD EQUIPMENT
ART. 1 . . . Communication devices, other than audio recorder, Local Area Network (LAN) phones and/or headsets, including but not limited to cellular phones, still photograph(s), film, analog or digital video(s) and/or Internet depictions, shall not be used for coaching purposes during the game or between periods.


How about dry erase boards to COMMUNICATE PLAYS?

Legal.

The purpose of the rule is to prevent wealthy schools from employing high-tech solutions unavailable to other schools.

I'd say a flip board is about as lo-tech as you can get, unless you want to write it on poster board with a Sharpie.

Exactly. Or shall we ban hand signals, too? Hands are communication devices...

This sounds like an example of why basic common sense and logic are such important qualities needed in officials

Exactly, hands are communication devices. Banning hand signals would handicap the teams from the schools for the deaf.

BTW, flipcharts were my favorite "steals" when I was working on a college coaching staff when I was in school. One team was using colored charts and hand signals, and by observing them and the plays they ran on the first drive or two, I had their entire scheme figured out. Our defense clamped down on them, but our offense couldn't capitalize. We lost by 2 after missing a field goal late in the game.

Isn't the object pictured a scoreboard?

It is a scoreboard but it is being used as a communication/coaching aid by many spread-no huddle teams.

To tell them what...the score? As usual, you bring a knife to a gunfight.

Whatever. I could care less. The rule is poorly written, bottom line.

It doesn't take too much imagination to see how one could use such a thing to signal in plays using numbers to send in plays using that "scoreboard" and QB wristbands (each player gets their own).

I've seen at least a couple teams use this exact method - a couple of managers flip the numbers to the play the coach wants called - the players look for the corresponding play on their wristband and off they go.

Canadian Ruling
 

CANADIAN RULING:

Don't go looking for mucous hanging from someone's nose.

I think that's easy when it's freezing out and the mucous isn't hanging. :D

Dude: he's Canadian. He's not going to see a contrast class. :D

Yes. Are they "coaches' field equipment?"

This ain't nuthin'. I don't suppose anyone reading here would be old enough to have officiated when all coaching from the sideline was ostensibly illegal.

If anyone on this board was around back then, he would remember red flags instead of yellow ones, and flags in the end zone instead of pylons, and...oh yeah, the goal posts on the goal line instead of the end line. Yes, a little history freak here. :D

...and no stripes on the socks and the wings "punching in" the TD and 4-man or 3-man crews and down boxes that were really boxes with a number on each of the 4 sides. I remember the goal posts on the GL for NFL but not FED ball. Maybe I am not old enough.

I contend that red flags would be better on dry fields late in the fall for afternoon games.

Or the legal flying cross body block.

Come on Big John
 

Do you have a proposal to revise the wording? If so can you share it?
It is real easy to pound out on a keyboard that something is "poorly written!"
Getting involved and offering suggested wording revisions requires a little more creativity.

No matter how old, you wouldn't remember goals on the goal line in Fed. NCAA had already moved the goals to the end line when Fed inherited them and started writing their own rules from that base. However, there was an early proposal in Fed to rename the goal line something like "score line" because the goals weren't on that line. And to rename "field of play" "scrimmage zone" because you could still play in the end zones but not scrimmage from there.

Rugby has kept the wording "field of play" too but eventually (much later than the Fed football proposal) adopted "playing area" to mean field of play + in-goal areas. "Field of play" goes way back to a time when the area beyond the goal lines was treated similarly to that beyond the side lines, and the ball belonged to whichever side touched it down there -- which action I guess they didn't count as "play".

Robert

Not to just reword, but how about just requiring any team to offer the same to the other team? Dry erase marker for dry erase marker, bullhorn for bullhorn, psychic transmitter for psychic transmitter, and enough advance notice to work out a system to use it. Not a playing rule enforced by field officials but a league regulation that would deal with the issue in advance of the game. If it was violated during the game, it would be treated the same way as using ineligible players.

Robert

FED may have moved the goal posts to the end line when they started writing the rules. I have an old book, that has some pictures from some high school games from the early years in Nebraska, and in a couple of those pictures, you can see the goal posts were clearly on the goal line.

But I'm pretty sure the Federation did not even exist at that time. If they existed, they didn't write their own football rules. Fed is as its name implies an organization that came about by the federation of existing state high school athletic ***'ns. Some of those HS ***'ns may have had their own rules for football (NCAA's with amendments), but in general everybody was using NCAA's rules for football when Fed organized. And although the NCAA was organized by & for colleges, before Fed existed NCAA had become conscious of the use of its rules by high schools and had someone reporting to their football rules committee with the interest of HS in mind.

I'd be interested in finding out whether any state HS athletic ***'ns or any local HS leagues either kept the goals on the goal lines for some number of seasons after NCAA moved them or made their positioning optional. After NCAA widened the goals to 23'4", many HS played, theoretically by Fed rules, on fields shared with colleges, and so were technically nonregulation, until about 15 yrs. later Fed allowed those goals as regulation in such circumstances. A few years later Fed made the wider goals the regulation ones. And then NCAA went and narrowed them again! I don't know if Fed followed a similar path on the re-narrowing to 18'6".

Robert