What happens next? What does that mean?

[dansaintandre]

You skirted what might be the root cause of all of this discussion. The lacrosse rules are written and maintained by the coaches with minimal input from officials at any level. During my work in industry, I find a huge number of situations where it works best to inform someone "here is a behavior; here is how to look for it; here are details to look for" Once the person has a high success rate in seeing each such behavior, then and only then do we introduce value judgements on the goodness or suitability of that behavior.

When applied to lacrosse, I encourage each official to write out a description of WHAT TO LOOK FOR; HOW DO YOU SEE IT; candidate behaviors for each of the possible infractions --- especially those that have a lot of interpretation associated with them. Once you have a written description of a behavior, next make a list of when that behavior is "illegal". If you find you must alter your description of the behavior to identify an illegal situation, you need to clean up your description of player actions.

Can we honestly say that we expect a large amount of agreement among lacrosse officials on these basic descriptions? Do you expect agreement on when each behavior is "illegal"? I think most will have a squishy answer and there-in lies my primary point:

=== WE CAN DO BETTER IN WRITING THINGS DOWN ===

My other point follows closely behind the first:

=== OFFICIALS NEED TO START WRITING THINGS DOWN SO THAT
MORE OFFICIALS USE A MORE OBJECTIVE APPROACH. WHEN WE ARE MORE CONSISTENT AND EFFECTIVE, THE RULES WILL FOLLOW ===