Ladies and gentlemen, high school football starts tomorrow night. There have been a few rule changes so in order to save you the anger and embarassment of yelling about the wrong thing, I'd figured I'd share with you. The entire set can be found on the NFHS website here.
One big one is defining a blindside block as illegal.
Another big one is making the pop up onside kick illegal. The intent of this rule is to eliminate the head hunting and blasting that happens when the receiving team is trying to catch the ball but the kicking team is trying to destroy them.
Those of you that watch the clock will notice the first time change in a long time.
Lastly, this change is going to make my job easier. Face guarding is now legal.
Here's a nice video from the Arkansas Association of High School Officials Association.
It's been 20 years since I first set foot on a high school football field as a first time referee. Twenty stinking years......
My first game was a varsity game and I don't exactly remember where it was but I think it was either Heritage or Paxton, IL. I know my second game was in Monticello because I got beat bad on the opening kick off by a Central A&M TD return which was fumbled at the goal line and an earful from our crew chief.....
It's kind of ironic that KCTV5 ran a story on schools having a hard time getting officials for games so it's a good time to ask any of you if you have ever thought about getting into refereeing send me an email.
It's motivated me to write this post and start asking folks if they'd like to get into it. For example, last Friday night our football crew was meeting at the QT at 291/I-35 and Councilwoman Heather Hall happened to be there with one of her sons. I introduced her to my crew chief who does a lot of assigning games and said if he was interested let us know because it's a great job. Good news because they're are going to give it a try this fall. I've got my 14 year old into soccer and my 12 year old can't wait to do football. They like the idea of "pay."
I've been doing basketball for 22 years and football for now 20. After about five years it becomes rather easy. You do get into a lot of bad games but you have to love it and like working with kids because it's all about giving them a chance to play sports and learn life skills like teamwork.
Fortunately the years of working so many games finally paid off last year as our crew was selected to work one of the seven state final football games. It was flat out amazing and awesome to work a game at Faurot Field under the lights and made it all worth it. I took a video before the game to just capture the feeling.
After the game we got to watch a little of the next game from the suites. It was an amazing experience.
Post game dinner with a view pic.twitter.com/0688TrfmjU
— Wes Minder (@WesKCMO) November 18, 2016
So if you've ever thought about it or have a kid who's in college who needs a decent paying job, let me know. I got started as a college freshman because minimum wage was $4.25 and refereeing paid $6 an hour. It was simple greed and doing something that was fun.
If any of you are high school coaches, I'd be more than happy to visit for a few minutes with your team and tell them how to get involved. This includes you ladies because officiating isn't just a guy thing. Just let me know because if we don't turn our athletes into officials, we're going to lose a generation of officials.
There's no reason why you couldn't do it. You'd be better than this guy.....
Clip credit to Paramount Pictures from The Naked Gun.
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