Libero debacle

[Scrapper1]

At a tournament last month, using USAV rules, the coach of Team A comes to me during warm-ups and asks if his libero's jersey is ok. The only contrasting "jersey" they have is number 312. I tell him it's not a legal number.

Eventually, they're able dig up a t-shirt with a contrasting color and a two-digit number. Perfect. Let's play. But wait, it only has a number on the back. No number on the front of the t-shirt. Seriously?

But it's the best we can do, and it is clearly a contrasting color, so I allow them to use it.

At the end of the first set, one of the Head Referees comes to my stand and asks if I've talked to Team B about their illegal libero jersey. I have no idea why he thinks it's illegal. The normal jerseys are black and gray stripes and the libero jersey is black and red stripes. As far as I can tell, they're easily distinguishable.

BUT, they are both 50% black. And by rule, the libero jersey has to have more than 50% of its torso as a contrasting color. So I learned that rule. And he went to talk to the coach, so I didn't have to. But they didn't have any other jersey, so the Head Referee allowed them to play with it.

Then halfway through the second set, I'm checking the libero's position and the back row hitter and I realized -- the Team A libero is wearing the same number as the hitter!! Unfreakingbelievable.

But we finished the match with the 2 illegal jerseys. After the match, both Head Referees and I had a pretty long debrief about the situations. I think they were more upset with the teams than with me for not realizing that both libero jerseys were illegal. In the debrief, I called it a "Libero debacle", and one of them laughed and thought it was perfect.