If I am reading this correctly, NFHS high school soccer is adopting the recent IFAB changes. https://nfhs.org/articles/dropped-ball-procedure-amended-in-high-school-soccer/
Why don't they just say they're updating some of the rules to be as consistent as possible with the recent changes to IFAB?
I pretty much knew the dropped ball change was coming. I have it on very good authority the chairman of the rules committee was really annoyed that they finally got the injury restart to mostly match IFAB only for them to change it on them.
The article says that there will be 15 rule changes, but the article does not mention 15. It'll be interesting to see what the others are when the full changes are published.
I'm glad they've finally stopped adding their own tweaks when they make the changes. Now they just straight copy the changes including the exact wording (see the ball hitting the ref...). I also find it funny that the explain them away in a way where it has nothing to do with IFAB. These were all our brilliant ideas!
Im sure the rest will be substition and uniform changes so that the entire test can be based on those two topics.
Of course they will be different again in 5 month when IFAB screws theirs up but at least its a start.
I'm having enough problems keeping the rules/laws straight in the current NFHS season and the Spring one. Hopefully by next year they will all be the same! ,
After they just added a stopping of the clock when under 5 min for the winning team. Doesn’t seem likely.
Now hopefully the NCAA will catch up with everybody else as well. It makes it really hard when you have to remember three different variations to the rules/laws.
Last week I couldn't remember whether the ball is in play when it's kicked on a free kick coming out of the PA. Had to come home and look it up.
I think Chad Collins of Kentucky, the previous committee chair, should receive most of the credit for this, for proposing the wording of these changes. For most of the IFAB to NFHS changes proposed this year, there were slightly different wordings proposed by other people, some of which would have not matched IFAB exactly, making the differences between NFHS and IFAB even harder to implement. We have to remember that NFHS views themselves as a 'high school sports and activities' organization. As a result, matching the rules of sport specific national governing bodies is not really an organizational value. Fortunately, some people at the NFHS rules committees level do want to have the rules the same, as much as possible, mostly officials and coaches. (Recognizing that some NFHS rules cover things that would be rules of competition in USSF.) The problems are usually administrators who don't really know the sport specific issues. It is just as bad in other sports. Track & field has four books (the equivalents of USSF and FIFA each have their own rules, besides high school and NCAA) and some of them are more dramatic than what we have in soccer. E.g. in USATF, IAAF and NCAA, everything is metric. In NFHS, running events are metric. Field events are Imperial. As a result, most of the field athletes don't know what a good mark is if you give it to them in metric. Is 18.29 meters a good triple jump? Is 6.18 meters a good pole vault? "What's that in real....." (those are the current men's world records.)
High School, College, US Professional, and Canadian Football have a lot of differences! Sometimes they even resemble each other.
Based on conversations yeah I’m betting he pushed hard to not change the wording and muddy things up any further.
While this is true, almost no football referees do more than one level, a very few do high school and college. Much different than soccer where we're doing at least 2 or more rule sets each weekend.
When I first started, I only did three versions of soccer: USSF, NFHS, and the local indoor rev center In this area, it’s pretty easy because there is very little USSF during the high school season so I would just compartmentalize thing: It’s the fall so forget FIFA rules for three months, it’s the winter so all I need is indoor rules, and it’s spring and summer so it’s only FIFA. There was no overlap. When I started doing college, that changed since college and high school happen at the same time around here and you have to take into account the junior college rules variations! Things got even more complicated for me when my nieces started playing AYSO which has a fall season here and guess who volunteered to officiate their games!
This is the biggest issue that sets soccer apart from most other sports. With most other American sports the inter scholastic leagues are the big show. They attract the talent and they are the path to the pros. Soccer is different in many regards. USYS is by far the larger organization in both population and popularity. Not to mention that the path to college and professional contracts is equal if not more likely through the USYS various leagues. NFHS is an attractive prospect for the ref looking for a bit more cash but the drawbacks often outweigh the rewards especially for those looking to advance their careers. Most state high school associations fail to realize this in my experience. They see themselves as the most attractive avenue to referee and make money. Which just isn’t the case.
Track is all at the same time of the year, and I do meets under all four books. We also have the strange situation that USA Track & Field (or, as some of us prefer to say, Field & Track) certifies officials but high school and college do not. They use USATF officials, to the extent we are available to do their meets and pretty much pull parents/coaches/students almost literally out of the stands to fill in where needed. I know that there are some gridiron football officials and basketball officials who do both high school and small college games. Not very many baseball umpires also do softball, at least from what I see, which probably isn't much. And, again as I understand it, boys and girls lacrosse has radically different rules. I remember something about how the girls' field can actually be a lot larger than a boys' field in that sport? And boys have to wear helmets because it's legal to whack each other on the head with your stick, but girls just wear eye protection?