Sunday, December 14, 2014

No refs, no rules?

All of the Volleyball leagues, and most tournaments,  I currently play in are "call your own" ie. no refs, so we go on the honor system. This is a really tough thing to get used to if you've been playing high school, college or club volleyball though, because in those games, if the ref doesn't call it, you carry on playing. So it's easy to get away with a gentle touch of the net, etc. 

Well, in the honor system, you have to fess up to any and every mistake you make, and any and every mistake any other player on your team makes. But the even tougher part is trying not to call (even the most blatently obvious) faults of the opposing team. Don't get me wrong, it happens a lot where both teams will just automatically call the fault and all is well, but once in a while the opposing team calls something for the other team and well, all hell breaks loose. 

The rule is "call your own" so it's wrong of us to call something that the other team does wrong, and vice versa (no matter how obvious!). 

For a while there, one of the most frustrating "lack of calls" was net calls. For a while the rules had changed so that you only had to call "touching the net" if when you did it, you were interfering with the play. So basically it came down to it only mattered if you touched the top tape while swinging or blocking. Everything else just kind of ended up being "okay". Well slowly people started to abuse this to the point where in one of our leagues we even had someone who thought it was fine to brace themselves on the net as long as it was after they played the ball, even if they ended up bumping into one of our players through the net (totally not okay, but there was no convincing this guy otherwise). 

Thank goodness recently the volleyball rules have gone back to the old way. NO MORE NET TOUCHES! Well to clarify: No net touches while in the action of playing the ball, this includes swinging, blocking, setting, etc. That means a gentle touch of the net is allowed if you're just running by, or if your ponytail touches, minor things like that. 

Now, even with the improvement in the rules, it doesn't mean there won't always be those people that try to sneak by with breaking the rules, but unfortunately no matter how strict they make the rules, this is going to be unavoidable. There are always going to be those types of people out there, but to me it's a matter of respect for the game, and I will always make it a priority to be honest with the other teams, my own players, and most importantly my self. 

Are you honest enough to call your own faults?

All for now, 
-Linds

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