Oh those rules

Okay, so what's the issue?

Originally Posted by JCG:

Okay, so what's the issue?

Just remember, you asked.

Last year’s HC scheduled most of the non-league games and a couple of pre-season scrimmages, all pretty standard stuff. The 1^st scrimmage was two games on the same day at another school where 3 other teams were going to play in a semi-round-robin day with each team playing 2 different teams, and the 2^nd scrimmage the next week against 1 team. In Oct the last coach was replaced by someone with a lot of coaching experience, but never having been a head coach in the area. He takes over and of course wants to finalize nest season’s schedule.

We’re allowed 27 contacts each season, and the schedule had 23 when he took over. 14 league games, 4 tournament games and 5 non-league games. He found two more teams that agreed to play us making it 25, but was told the scrimmages would have to count as contacts, with both days counts is 1 contact. Being a new coach, he didn’t know precisely why the scrimmages should count, but accepted what the state assn told him.

As the guy who keeps the stats and submits the scores and other stats to MaxPreps, I assumed since the scrimmages were counted as contacts I was supposed to post the scores and the stats. But, I know the state assn uses the games in MaxPreps to do rankings and the section and league uses them to give end of year awards like all-city and all-league, and that 1^st day was giving me a problem because if I entered both games that day it would give us 28 contacts for the season with the likely penalty losing at least 1 contact the next season.

I let the new HC know about MaxPreps so he could talk to the AD and find out which way to go, and asked why the scrimmages were being counted as contacts. He said he didn’t know, so I told him I’d see what I could find. I looked through the state bylaws and found the following.

505.3 SCRIMMAGES

A maximum of two scrimmages per team are permissible prior to the first game (league or non-league) of the season. Said scrimmages shall not count in the team’s contact total.

Scrimmages held after a team’s first game shall count as contacts.

NOTE: A scrimmage is defined as supervised competition between two or more teams where:

a.No officials are paid.

b.Admission may be charged, but the price may not exceed $4; closed scrimmages are

permissible.

c.No score/results are released to the media or Maxpreps.

d. No awards are presented.

I sent it to him and told him that as far as I could see, those games weren’t supposed to count as contacts. He then said he wasn’t aware that paying the umpires was a problem. What had happened was, the umpire’s assn almost always sends umpires to pre-season games without pay as a way to get them back in the groove so to speak, In fact, most of the time we’ll see as many as 4 umpires show up for a scrimmage, with them switching around from behind the plate to the field in order to get a little work in. Well, the assn couldn’t guarantee umpires for those scrimmages, but the coaches wanted umpires there, so they ponied up the cash to pay them. Evidently none of the coaches or AD’s knew the rule about scrimmages or didn’t even think about it, and the games changed from scrimmages to contacts.

With this new information, the new HC at our school took the problem to the AD so he could try to get it cleared up with the state. The rationalization seems pretty sound to me. If he was aware of the rule, he’d have either found umpires willing to do the games for free, or would have had coaches or players calling the game from behind the mound. That way the games would be “real” scrimmages without being limited to the full blown rule set, and we’d be able to schedule 2 more games this season.

Of course the players and parents aren’t getting the full story, and very few of them know or understand the rules. Being the guy who writes the newsletter and often explains the rules in it, of course I was the guy getting asked if I knew what was going on, and that’s what prompted me to write that newsletter. There’s a lot of people who really don’t know all those rules are out there, and many that do, don’t know where to find them.

And all this helps the kids how?

Too many stupid rules made by too many stupid people. 

Originally Posted by Golfman25:

And all this helps the kids how?

Too many stupid rules made by too many stupid people. 

Well, I can only guess why those particular rules were written, and I certainly don’t see how they help anyone. Since those rules weren’t state rules but rather section rules, I’m guessing somebody was playing way too many scrimmages prior to the season than was prudent, somebody got their nose bent out of shape, and that rule is the result.

Why would anyone think to report the score of a scrimmage to Max Preps? There is no score at a scrimmage.  Stats do not count.  Leave the scoreboard off.  Leave the ipad home. 

Rule was probably written because some team,cat some point, said "hey let's play a scrimmage." But then they had more runs at the end so they said "nope this was a game!"  Or the other way around..,

Originally Posted by JCG:

Why would anyone think to report the score of a scrimmage to Max Preps? There is no score at a scrimmage.  Stats do not count.  Leave the scoreboard off.  Leave the ipad home. 

Well, MP doesn’t accept scrimmage scores or stats. But if the game is technically not a scrimmage because it didn’t meet all the requirements, and is gonna count as a contact for both teams, why not report the score? It wouldn’t make any difference as far as league standings go, but it might make a difference in rankings.

When did the scrimmages become games?  You're talking about future events, right?  The umpires have not been paid yet, have they? (who ever pays umpires until they show up?) If somebody entered the contests into MaxPreps, then that could be a trigger I suppose.  If so, can you delete them?

There are good reasons for some of these rules in terms of keeping things fair, or in the case of contact sports, keeping kids safe. But our CIF section has a budget of over $2 million and three section officials are making over $100K per year.  That factor alone is going to result in a whole lot of rules being written and enforced.

Originally Posted by JCG:

When did the scrimmages become games?  You're talking about future events, right?  The umpires have not been paid yet, have they? (who ever pays umpires until they show up?) If somebody entered the contests into MaxPreps, then that could be a trigger I suppose.  If so, can you delete them?

When Arbiter schedules umpires, the umpires expect to be paid because they’re no longer available for other contests, and that I can understand and have no problem with. The bone of contention seems to be that the coaches didn’t understand those 4 criteria. I couldn’t care less, but if it’s going to be counted as a game/contact anyway, I was going to enter them into MaxPreps. The problem is, MP doesn’t have a way to make all the contests on one day count as 1 contact, so when I put in both games they’d end up being counted as 2 contacts.

The whole thing comes because of ignorance on the part of the new coaches. I’ve already talked at length to ours and we’ve joked that he’ll never make that mistake again. If he’d have known about the paid umpires thing he’d never have asked for umpires and that would have been the end of it. We’d have had coaches or players for umpires like so many other scrimmage games.

It’s really an unnecessary mess as far as I’m concerned. If that particular rule were dropped, I can’t see how suddenly the integrity of HS baseball in our section would go to Hell in a hand basket. I didn’t look at all the sections, but I looked at 5 of them and they had no such rule so I can’t see how it’s a life and death thing.