I had a high school coach refuse to play on a field that had a fairly small penalty area. The home coach got out the lining equipment and changed the marks while everyone waited.
Yes, that's what we want to have happen. We just want the games to be played. We switch ends at half time for a reason. Both teams will suffer/benefit from the random events that may be caused by the penalty area being too small or too big or misshapen. Time out for a non-violent war story. I was once doing a JV boys' game on the school's practice field. One penalty area looked pretty strange to me, so I stepped it off, as I tend to do anyway. The penalty area lines that are perpendicular to the goal line were different lengths! One was 18 yds., like it should be, of course, and the other was 12 yds. Sure enough, we had a foul that would have been inside a properly drawn penalty area but, for this game, it was outside. We have a state adoption that specifically says that if the field is or appears to be too small or too large, the game is played anyway and the referee reports the problem. I once did a playoff game in a semi-rural area, where the field was square. 75 x 75, with the goals cemented into the ground. What are you going to do? Unless it's a safety issue, the schools just want to play. When I was in high school, one school in our league had a gym so small ("How small was it?"), it was so small that the basketball backboard was mounted directly on the wall. They had a 'restraining line' drawn about 10 feet from the wall so the players could put the ball back in play after a basket. I once asked one of our assistant executive directors at the state high school association how bad it had to be before they would step in about a facilities issue. He told me that one of our 1A schools (total enrollment under 80) was playing basketball in their "cafetorium," on all weather carpeting. Yeah, I think that's going to be an issue.
That brings back memories . . . basketball courts with center circles overlapping the top of the key, with two half-court lines -- had to cross the farther one and then could drop back to have room to actually (at least sort of) run an offense . . .
Yup..had one of those when I was in Jr High. Was a Church Rec Ctr. One wall was brick and other had big door handles sticking out. Young Priest would give me keys to get in only if I promised to attend next Catechism class. He usually would come to play and I still have a few scars. I believe he must have left the Ministry, married, and sired Bill Laimbeer! Truman was halfway thru his second term!
My mother was always proud of how she had been the "jump center" in high school basketball, despite being about 5'1", which was short for a basketball player, even in those days. At least in her mind, she would be disrespected by the other teams' center and then she'd out-jump them. That was a time, in the early 1930's, when they jumped it up in the center circle after every basket. Their scores were, like, 13-8.
I played on a court similar to that. Baskets on the wall. Line was an inch from the wall on all 6 sides. Yes, I said 6. One side of the gymatorium had a stage and enterances to the gym were in the corners which were at a 45 degree angle. Add to that the 3 point line cut off on the sides due to the very narrow court. Despite that the place was called the Beaver Dome, as if it was some grand sports palace or something. Glad it wasn't my HS gym and we only had to go there once a year. Most of the gyms in that league were small with over and back lines but that place was ridiculous. At least the soccer fields were the right size, most of the time.
I remember back in high school of playing on a very narrow soccer field. The touchlines were maybe two feet from the full sized penalty area. This was back when a goalkeeper could handle a throw-in and we were basically (but not quite) handing him the ball on a throw-in during that game. I remember there were a lot of penalty kicks in the game because most of the attacking third of the field was in the penalty area so any foul was a penalty kick.
I don't know if dumbing dumb my refereeing is the correct concept. I think the appropriate way to look at things is calling the game at the level that the players and coaches can understand in order to facilitate a safe, fair match. During the spring season, my two most enjoyable matches were U-18 games. One was an intense U-18 boys match between two ethnic teams that really wanted either no foul or plastic and no foul was basically anything short of blood. After the first three hard tackles in the first minute where the tackled players just got up and looked for space, I was fine with that. The other one was a U-18 girls Classic game where both teams had half a dozen girls on D-1 scholarships or scholarship offers, I could tell players on an charge that if they won't get that call in a Big 10 match, they would not get it that night... and again, after the first ten minutes, they were great with it. If I tried to call a high school match with the level of physicality and aggression that the four teams above displayed, I would be shocked if I got off the field with only two studs up into the thigh challenges. And conversely, if I called the two matches above like a low-level varsity game, I would have 50 very pissed off high level players. Adjust to the situation and the situation includes coaching knowledge. It is not dumbing down, it is taking an assessment of atmosphere and expectations while working within those external constraints.
Well said but that does not address a problem that is specific to HS ball and HS ball alone. You have players on the top end of play, rec players that suck horribly, and everything in between all on the field playing together. Keeping all of them happy and refereeing to all of their expectations is both a fun challenge and at times next to impossible when it comes to managing the rec player that is in way over their head. For club ball/college/most amateur/pro everyone is more or less on the same page.
I agree, talent and expectation disparity on a single team much less in a single league/division/section/class is far more varied in high school than pretty much anywhere else except adult co-ed. And I definitely adjust down. The elite player won't get the same game called in high school compared to club ball. When I see that D-1 recruit who I asked if she was expecting that call in the Big 10 next month after I blow the whistle on a bit of contact that she may have been able to play through, I'll go up and talk to her very quietly and say "I know you can play through that, but at least eight of your teammates can't..." and the good players understand that. The best players know that the high school game is not the place to expect hard but clean challenges because the skill level to do both hard and clean is not there. There was one HS All American/D-1 full rider who I never saw go into a 50/50 situation in high school... he figured he could get the ball off a bad touch far more safely. Same kid in elite USSF play was a fierce challenger because he assumed the guy he was challenging knew how to safely play tangled up.
Very similarly, I had a varsity boys' game where the home team had one guy that really stood out. He was also doing little stuff that wasn't that far off of what the other guys were doing because they didn't have the skills, but this guy was doing it deliberately. Nothing bad, just little stuff, almost in the category of 'I'm going to give you a little extra something but you [the opponent] are too stupid to even know I'm giving you the business.' I finally told him, "You're the best player out here, Stevie. You don't need to be doing that kind of crap." He got the message. Stevie's now playing PDL/MLS Reserve Team.
It's the classic scenario where -- and this will make some refs and non-refs freak out -- you have to call the match differently for the different players. "Fair" doesn't mean equal, as we know, and that can mean some players get a foul called for their behavior and others may not. This sounds horrible in print but actually is quite useful in practice. I've found these situations certainly require a deft hand and it's easy to mess it up even though it seems like an easy match to officiate. A comment I've said many times before is some of the amateur matches are uniquely challenging in a way a professional match never is. One of the reasons why if you see a high level referee do, say, a competitive youth match it can be pretty ugly. I remember watching a FIFA who had done World Cup matches completely bomb a U16 match at Dallas Cup. Most of it was because of the need to adapt to some lower skilled players, something that just didn't seem to register until it was too late.
In my neck of the woods, we have several schools that seem to get many of the club players. Other schools are comprised mostly of kids who are in the off-season from other sports with no real coached soccer skills, but where many are just natural atheletes. When teams in these two demographics come together, it can, as Paper.St.Soap.Co points out, lead to some very interesting situations when it comes to decision making for the referees.
I actually believe that this is one issue with foul recognition when you take a high school aged soccer player, have him pass the grade 8 class, then go ref U-littles. They don't adjust what they want as a "foul" when they play, down to the munchkin level. Same basic issue, adjusting your bar to what the players at that level need called.
Very true. Adding to the confusion, we instructors tell them to be confident and sometimes this comes across as "you're always right, ignore fans and players." Well, yes, we want you to ignore some of the rubbish but within that garbage pile of complaining are some nuggets of truth. Sometimes the players give some great feedback on what they think is a foul and not a foul today. More reasons why those angry parents should chill -- it's not an easy job!
I've found that doing co-ed adult games helps with this adjustment to 'who is it who's doing what.' Is this two skilled guys going at each other? A skilled guy going up against a woman with no perceptible skills? Or how about two women where one played in college and the other was never a high school player? Lest you think me sexist about this, I know of one team where the guys are all overweight and can only kick the ball a long way, while the women are the ones who carry the team because they have the skills. (Interestingly, none of the women appeared to be related to any of the men on the team, which makes you wonder how the team got formed.) They are all in the same game, but you have to let the skilled players play, as long as they aren't beating up on the unskilled players, so everybody, skilled or not, can enjoy the game.
For a couple of seasons, we used this 'situational parity' concept in our lower division Adult league (3rd of 3 divisions)--where many highly skilled players ended up for various reasons. It did not work out for us. We found that this approach led to a spiral upward of physicality, when high skill met medium skill, high skill parameters were used. Now we try to insist on low contact across the board. If they get perturbed, we just tell them that there are 2 higher divisions where they can play that way. Unfortunately, this is not an option in HS.