Be the Referee: Football Targeting
August 22, 2014
The series features MHSAA assistant director Mark Uyl's insights on officiating. These weekly messages can be heard on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays during the school year on The Drive With Jack Ebling on WVFN-AM, East Lansing.
Below is this week's segment:
"Be The Referee"
Aug. 25 - Targeting - Listen
Today we are going to talk about one of the new rules changes for this fall’s high school football season, targeting. This is yet another example of player safety being the number one priority in our game.
Targeting deals with getting the “head” out of the game of football. Many times when you will see a targeting foul is when a player will use the top or the crown of his helmet to launch or propel himself into an opposing player, making that helmet to helmet contact, which can be so dangerous for both players involved.
When a targeting foul happens, the officials, if they judge it to be flagrant, can not only enforce a 15-yard penalty but also can eject the offending player.
The Sports Officiating Challenge
July 30, 2013
Last Saturday, the MHSAA hosted the largest gathering of sports officials ever assembled in this state at one time and place: 1,248 under the same roof.
The occasion was “Officiate Michigan Day” that preceded the 31st Sports Officiating Summit conducted by the National Association of Sports Officials (NASO) in Grand Rapids. The summit began Sunday and concludes this evening in Grand Rapids.
On Sunday afternoon, nearly 300 of Michigan’s officiating leaders – local association officials and trainers and registered assignors – went through three hours of training which the MHSAA requires face to face every other year.
All this comes at a challenging time for our officiating program which is most dramatically demonstrated by this fact: the number of MHSAA registered officials has declined by 1,895 - 17.5 percent – over the past four years!
We know of course that our registration totals were temporarily inflated by two outside factors after 2007. First, after the court-ordered change in sports seasons for girls basketball and volleyball, the MHSAA allowed officials to add those sports to their registration free of charge in 2007-08 through 2010-11. And second, as is always the case, the recession pushed many new people into officiating; but again, just temporarily – we’ve lost many of them as the economy has slowly improved.
I do believe the MHSAA and its member schools and the local officials associations that serve school sports are up to the challenge we face. The same community that just rallied to provide record attendance in Grand Rapids has the ability to reverse the trend that could weaken school-based sports: fewer officials.
We will get there with three E’s: (1) encouraging officials; (2) equipping officials; and, most of all, (3) providing officials an environment in which to thrive – that’s one that is safe, sane and sportsmanlike.
I’ll have more to say on all three E’s over the course of the next few months. In the meantime, I invite you to learn more about officiating in Michigan here at MHSAA.com.
Officate Michigan Day Recap: Photo Gallery | Story