horn17 wrote:not needed in college anymore, but what about HS???
an offical yesterday called him for not having a ball stop and said it is required via HS rules....confirmation please - i thought they tossed this out??? He didnt penalize him, but allowed him to fix it. Whats the story here...because if they are supposed to be there, Im calling for stick checks on some players in the future....
he also said he could have wiped the goal, and given the bench a 2 minute unsportsmanlike for not having "approved and regulated the players equipment..." you know the questions asked before the game starts....
Paging Laxref, paging Laxref.....
Requiring ball stops no longer makes sense. My understanding is that they were needed to keep the ball from lodging in the throat of wood crosses years ago—I'm not old enough to remember that, mind you—but that requiring them in modern crosses is an anachronism. Because of this, I submitted a rule change suggestion to NCAA to have the ball stop requirement removed for this year, and this change was accepted.
I did not submit it to NFHS because I wanted to see if the NCAA accepted it first; I'm trying to cut down the number of rule differences between NCAA and NFHS (now numbering close to 100), not add to them.
NFHS still requires a ball stop. The correct ruling is to tell the player to get a ball stop if he does not have one; the stick is
not illegal in the sense of disallowing a goal or carrying a penalty (similar to the end cap and strings longer than 6 inches), but if the player returns without fixing it a 1:00 NR USC is assessed. So save your stick checks for other violations (if the only thing wrong with the stick was no ball stop, there would be no penalty, so you'd lose your "free" check).
In NFHS, two ball stops is a 3:00 NR penalty with the goal disallowed (assuming stick is inspected after the goal and before play restarts).
As to the 2:00 NR USC for being wrong when certifying . . . well, there are those who believe that an illegal stick penalty should also be accompanied by a USC on the coach for certifying that all of the equipment is legal when it wasn't, but if they wanted that I'm pretty sure it would be mentioned in the rulebook somewhere.
Finally, none of this is to say that you shouldn't have a ball stop. Some people like them, and if you want one, it's fine. But I see no reason to
require a ball stop; that makes as much sense as requiring people to not string their stick like a women's stick/tennis racket. We generally have rules to keep people from gaining an unfair advantage, not to keep them from disadvantaging themselves!
Posted: Wed May 09, 2007 10:08 am