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Serving the scholastic field hockey and lacrosse community since 1998Archive for September 10, 2010
Sept. 10, 2010 — A rules quirk and a dilemma
Game of the Day
Martinsville Pingry School (N.J.) at Flemington Hunterdon Central (N.J.), 4 p.m
Two of the proudest programs in northwest New Jersey are fighting a championship drought. Pingry, after dominating Group I for a stretch in the 2000s, has not been able to counter Summit Oak Knoll in the postseason. On the other hand, Hunterdon Central won just five games a year ago. This is the same school that was playing in the Group IV state championship game earlier in the decade. The winner gets a leg up in Skylands Conference competition.
Thought I’d use this Friday entry to give an opportunity to address a rules question.
So the scenario is that a field hockey team has a 9-0 lead already, and the coach does not want to score any more goals — particularly on penalty corners.
The team can earn penalty corners pretty readily.
What the team could do is simply nullify its own corner — create an offensive violation (flub the insertion, encroach into the circle), or the inserter could be the only offensive player inside the 25 and just simply inbound the corner so that one of the four field players in the cage can take the ball and run with it.
But could the offensive captain and coach simply tell the umpire that they decline the right to take the penalty corner and give the other team a free hit from the 16, and just save the time to set up a corner that is never destined to succeed?
In many other sports, there are certain “give-ups” in various situations. A football team up enough points can kneel down or even punt on first down. A baseball team can issue an intentional base on balls, or a lacrosse team can attempt only left-handed passes.
Field hockey seems to have no built-in mechanism for waiving a penalty corner. Given some of the outlandish scores in North America over the last decade or so, don’t you think something like that might help cut down on the runaway scores?
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