So as the girls HS season begins here in WI, I decided to go back to the MNSRA website to go through a presentation they have in their training module that is a presentation given back in 2010 by a Virginia SRA (I think at the time) named Carla Nagel Winters. It is a 60 minute presentation where she goes over differences in officiating the women's game. It is an interesting video that touches on many different subjects, but the two that seem to stick out for me is when she talks about women's center of gravity being around the hips, as opposed to men's center being at their shoulders. She makes the case that women then balance by raising their arms and arms up is a "I surrender" pose is a natural position for a woman to be in. She then goes on to ask the group if they call more handling calls in a woman's match compared to a men's. But she never actually said that you would NOT call handling on a girl who had her arms raised. So, is their a consensus on that? I have seen this many times and it is hard not to call it because the player seems to be making themselves bigger, but is it natural for a women to retain balance by raising their arms. I just don't know how to sell that non call. The other thing she was talking about is again with the center of gravity, is that a shoulder to shoulder contact goes from their shoulder down to their hip. due to the level of play I normally see I don't have any issues with that. It was a good presentation, lots of good information but those two things stuck out to me as some main differences in overall foul recognition. Anyone else happen to see this presentation or agree with this?
I would like to watch that. Do you have the link ready to hand? She didn't go so far as to suggest that the hip check is a legal challenge in the women's game, did she? (In response to "How was that a foul ref," I overheard myself telling a HS varsity boys player the other night "That hip check is not a legal challenge, even in the girls' game.")
As far as center of mass go, women are more likely to foul with hips, of course this is more common in adult or college games than high school where girls may not be as developed to use that advantage. As with shoulder challenges when determiningif it's a foul, ask yourself is it careless, reckless or endangering the safety of an opponent.
Let us assume HS Varsity and College here....I call less handballs on women for a couple of reasons... 1. Their passes are generally lower and below the waist then in a boys/men match. 2. Their passes are generally shorter in distance. 3. I have seen in numerous boys/mens matches guys who will intentionally kick the ball and try and target their opponent's arm or hand to try and get a call, you can actually see it in their eye before they kick it. Very very rarely do I see a girl intentionally kick the ball to their opponent in that manner. 4. For some reason I play more advantage in a women's match, so I will acknowledge it but I am more likely to play advantage.
The only link I could find is the MNSRC website. It is part of their online training material. I think the only way you can access that training is to get you MN license. So if you have $45 burning a hole in your pocket. I tried to look on you tube, but nothing was under her name or that category. Maybe if @MNpenguin is around he might know if anyone else can view it.
Agree, but my main question with handling had to do with the arm positioning. Especially in less competitive HS matches. I have seen plenty of girls run or balance themselves with their arms raised in a position that if I was doing a men's game I would consider making oneself bigger. Should I NOT consider that in a woman's game where it could be a mere act of balancing?
I'm going to probably get accused of being sexist or something for this but you can't both ask to be treated equally but then say we should treat you differently.
Metro DC/Virginia association has this online here: http://www.vadcsoccerref.com/referee_resources/index_E.html Down near the bottom.
Depending on the skill level, no I do not treat a women's game any different than a men's game when it comes to fouls and laws of the game. I do however recognize that women do play and use different tactics so I adjust. At lower levels, and sometimes at a higher level, we see women lift their arms to the side of their chest when a ball is approaching them. If the ball hits their hand, I call a handball. It's that simple. Is it instinctive, to some extent yes, but it also makes them bigger and that is not allowed in our game. If any of them want to progress to a higher level, they must adjust and get rid of that habit. You won't see many of the pro female players do this.
My two cents: If the arms are in the natural balancing position, it's not biggering. The concept of making oneself bigger is about catching the sneaky player who is deliberately creating a higher chance of "ball to arm" contact and thereby stealing space from an opponent. .
surely there are generalities that one can make. one is that ladies' games sometimes a player will lash out with little warning whereas men's games you can usually see the red mist in a player before he boils over. i have heard these talks before about the physical aspect of ladies' games meaning that you have to look for the foul in different places. seems nowadays, the games and the ladies' physiques are frankly not very consistent. i have seen the 6ft 2" forward whose play style is almost the same as her male counterpart in terms of grappling, jostling for position. i think the reason is that her center of gravity is not really any lower on her than her male counterpart. conversely, you at times have the fireplug male who is 5ft 5" 165 who is solid as a stump and as long as his hips are square, you are not getting him off the ball no matter how much upper body you use on him. i think it's good to be aware of how body types use their strengths to their advantage, but to me it is not purely a matter of male/female.
Natural for who? I once had a fellow ref try to argue that if a players natural running motion took his swinging arms all the way up to eye level in the front and then to shoulder on the backswing it shouldn't be handling. I personally believe we should use the average human test for natural position. Not a toy soldier marching. I'm not trying to be snarky but again I think we need to treat all equally here and not try to get into the individual skill levels or body type adjustments for arm movement. Google failed me and this was the best funny pic I could find.
There is no offense of having the arms in an unnatural position and then being hit by the ball. The offense in the LOTG is deliberately handling the ball. We use unnatural position, in the right context as a tool to determine if the contact was, in fact, deliberate. How some hypothetical average human might be likely to balance him or herself does nothing to tell us if the behavior by this player was deliberate handling. This is, perhaps, why IFAB does not include unnatural position in Law 12 among the criteria to be considered by the referee, but instead says "the position of the hand does not necessarily mean that there is an infringement." Far too often the discussion of natural position loses the whole point of the discussion: the ultimate question is whether the handling was deliberate.
This is why I have a pre game even on rec games, that way my AR and me can be on the same page when it comes to things like handling.
Indeed. So then do we allow one player over another to use some exaggerated body movement to take up more space than is strictly necessary? I'm not advocating punishing for the ball hitting the arm but a reasonablness test must come into play at some point.
That sounds a whole lot like a clue that the behavior is deliberately done to take up space. (But if he's just a klutz who runs like that all the time, then he's just a klutz and not acting deliberately.)
I agree. If only deliberate handballs are called, what's to stop players (and even coaches' instructions) from intentionally having their arms in an "unnatural" position the whole game, or at least more often than usual, so they can have handballs that are not deliberate, or at least don't look deliberate? Players shouldn't be rewarded for having their arms as far away from their body as possible. Players shouldn't be expected to predict the exact path of the ball through the air, but they should be expected to know where not to have their arms.
Thanks, I was on that page but didn't scroll down to the bottom!! Here is the part about the "physics" of men/women. http://www.dcvasrp.com/videos/officiating_womens_games/wgame3.htm I think someone can tell by the skill level of the player whether they used their arms for balance and one that has used them to gain an advantage on the ball. If a coach would try and make their players run around with arms is an "unnatural" position for a 90 minute match to have the chance of getting a good bounce off a perceived ball to hand call is a VERY poor coach IMO and again I believe we should be able to tell from watching a player when they are being deliberate and when they are just trying to "walk and chew gum" at the same time.
Well, since the Laws say that only deliberate handling is to be called, if you don't like that, you should take it up with IFAB. How about reality? Ever seen it? No, because running in an unnatural way would impair their performance, and they aren't going to sacrifice that on the off chance they might get an odd bounce off their arm and it might not get called. Nice straw man. No on here has ever remotely suggested anything anywhere near close to that. Law 12 is simple. Deliberate handling of the ball is an offense. And the position of the arm doesn't necessarily make it an offense. That's black and white in Law 12. It's our job to draw lines between deliberate and not deliberate. As referees we seem to want to make this way more complicated than it has to be. If a player puts his arm somewhere so that it can get hit, that's deliberate. If the player leaves his arm somewhere so that it can get hit, that's deliberate. If the arm is away from the body in a way that is not natural that takes a way space from the other team that's a good clue that it was likely deliberate. If the arms are unnecessarily making the player bigger, that's a good clue that the handling was deliberate. If the player is charging at the ball without keeping his hands out of the way, that's a good clue it's deliberate. But at the end of the day, the ultimate decision for the referee about handling is only binary question: was the handling deliberate? Everything else is a clue or a tool to help the referee make that evaluation. And how those clues are properly interpreted by a skilled referee is going to vary based on the level of play (age and skill) -- in the world cup, it's extremely likely that any contact between arm and ball deliberate due to the level of body control; in 10U rec games, the opposite is true.
I agree with everything said here. I think the reason this got started is because, I at least, don't think we should open up the door to trying to differentiate what is and isn't a violation based on gender and/or sex of a player. We all play the same game.
Agree. And I don't really think anyone was quite saying that. But how we interpret the clues may be different -- the arm position that is a clue to deliberate handling may be different and we need to read players to interpret. And the kind of contact that is trifling may change as different centers of balance may cause, on average, men and women to play effectively through different contact -- but that also varies among players -- what is trifling contact on the 240 lb muscular dude may not be trifling on the fleet footed but 150 lb slightly build forward.
The late Clive Charles, who coached both the men and women at University of Portland, would always say that you should call the women's game the same as the men's game. And I always thought to myself when he would say that, 'that may be true at the D1 level but D3 women is a different story, never mind high school and youth.' I also knew that Clive wanted a more physical style of play from his women than maybe most D1 women's teams, so he was also working the referees when he'd say those kinds of things in the referee clinics where he'd been invited to talk about 'the women's game.'