Roughing or not Study Group ? #1

[The Roamin' Umpire]

Originally Posted by ajmc

Different rules at different levels, so depending on which code you're working under, I guess if your objective is making "the relevant people" like you, you may have a point. Otherwise, if you're working under the NFHS code, you might consider just doing your job.

I assure you, making people like me has never been my objective - if nothing else, I shoot my mouth off too often for that to work anyway.

I should clarify my original statement: I have no interest in making the particular coaches that I see on a given night happy. I have some interest in making my assigner/supervisor happy. I have a great interest in making the area's players, coaches, and even fans as a whole happy with the games they are seeing, and by extension the officiating - and that requires some common understanding about how certain plays will be called.

Furthermore (and this was a major change in philosophy for me that took years to process), I recognize that that rulebook is not the entirety of that common understanding. It's a joint venture between coaches and officials - if the coaches are unhappy with the way something is being called, they'll let the officials' association know. The officials, in turn, will revise the "standards" they use when making a judgment on that type of play. And I think that's how it should be - in the end, the game is not "ours" but "theirs"; we're just there to serve their needs.

So, what I was saying in my original reply is that I strongly believe (and I *could* be wrong) that if you showed a tape of the play described to 100 coaches and/or supervisors, 80+ would say that grounding was a poor call. Since I'm not sure, I intend to bring it up at one of our association's preseason meetings, because in the end, we want everybody to call this the same way.