And how do we determine deliberate vs instinctual. My issue is that NFHS is removing the ability of the Referee to judge the action on the situation. The way it’s written the player has carte blanche freedom to block the ball when it’s heading toward the head, chest or groin. These are “DEEMED to be reflex”, not “the Referee should determine if the action was a reflex” And yet in the same rule book the NFHS says “It is not an offense in itself to be in an offside position.” Then on the part 2 every year they have a question that states a Ball is played over the top to a player in an offside position, while in flight a defender reaches up and slaps the ball down. Correct restart? IFK for offside. Reading the NFHS rulebook and trying to apply logic or standard definition to the words is often a fools game.
Must make those 4 PM High School games interesting. Do you kick off second half with the drink or do you run by the sideline?
Actually, it simplified them. It now allows the home team to wear pink for a special occassion if they feel like it without getting special approval. Makes sense.
To me, switching the color of the uniforms isn't that big a deal. Home uniforms are now "dark" and road uniforms are now white. The big deal is the adoption of IFAB's DOGSO yellow. I can see some HS only coaches and officials thinking that there are now no red cards for penalty area misconducts!
1) I agree the jersey change is 100% logical. 2) Some refs are going to screw this up. Refs will give yellows for DOGSO outside the PA. Some will still give reds when they shouldn't. Some will give yellows when it should be red. Still, I like the change to match up with FIFA.
Took the NFHS tear the other day. We need a 75 to pass and an 85 to ref playoff games. Without much studying, I went ahead and took it. I ended up getting a 74! I was shocked at how many minute details we have to know. Luckily, we get FIVE tries on the test. After typing up the rules I got wrong, I spent the next day studying and got an 87 on my second try!
The NFHS test is notoriously bad for wanting you to both know when they want you to know the EXACT wording on something and also when they want to paraphrase for things they think are obvious.
Full disclosure: I wrote many of the questions on the test. The rules committee has a subcommittee each year that is designated to write some new test questions. The problem with that setup is that some members of the subcommittee are administrators and/or coaches and not experts on being a referee. The second problem is that the questions they come up with are typically focused on the current year's rule changes. The third problem was that far too many of the questions were written in a way that tested reading ability more than actual rule knowledge. On the flip side, there will always be a problem that a written test can't test 'is this a foul?' or do any better than lame text based descriptions of possible offside situations. NFHS has a test question bank of about 150 to 200 questions, all derived from subcommittee work in the past. The current year's questions are pulled from the test bank and rotated so that they don't get used too often. Seeing that too many of the questions were oriented towards rule changes that had taken place maybe three years ago, I wrote 100 new questions, checked them with some local people that knew NFHS rules pretty well, and submitted them to NFHS. Some of what I wrote is still being used, and much has been replaced by later subcommittee work. The NFHS staff person for soccer has also changed. There were several questions this year that had not been edited for the change in which team wears which color shirts and socks. There were also several other questions that left me puzzled about exactly what the situation was and/or not liking any of the possible answers. I got a 99. Drat. Just trying to make me humble.
As we all know, Rule 3 and 4 are the important ones and therefore cover about half of the test questions.
I got a 49/50 right. The one question that I supposedly missed I also got right but for some reason it counted it as a miss.
I know there will always be logistical issues with tests. The ones that drive me crazy are the questions where they throw answers like Unsporting Behavior as one answer (a red herring since I’m NFHS it’s unsporting conduct) and another answer that is simply Misconduct. Guess which one is correct? And there is always my favorite one where a defender reaches up and slaps down a ball traveling in the air to a player in and offside position, what’s the restart. IFK for offside of course, because... reasons.
I had a college professor tell me that the best test was one in which the best student got a 99. If they had gotten 100, how much more did they know?
As I tell the coaches when I meet with them before the season about the rule changes, about 1/3 of the rules committee members are administrators with no playing, coaching or officiating experience, so the only part of the rules they understand are things like uniforms and that's where they focus their attention.
My favorite question was, "True/False It is okay for a referee to drink alcohol the day before a game." The answer was, of course, false, it is not okay to drink alcohol on the day of the game before the game. All ten in the class got the question wrong thinking that they were asking, "If you have a game on Thursday, is it okay to drink on Wednesday?"