Remember this?
Yesterday, a story came out on ESPN.com that the Collegiate Women’s Lacrosse Officials Association and the Intercollegiate Women’s Lacrosse Coaches Association made the tightening of safety rules in women’s lacrosse agenda items in recent meetings.
In particular, the discussion surrounded stick-to-body contact, especially in vulnerable areas of the torso.
“I think this injury caught everybody by surprise,” said IWLCA executive director Liz Robertshaw. “You don’t hear about this kind of thing often.”
Apparently, neither did the NCAA. According to the ESPN story, the classification of women’s lacrosse as a non-contact sport necessarily means that there are fewer medical personnel at women’s games than there are at men’s games. According to Stony Brook athletic director Shawn Heilbron, the 90-minute delay before the diagnosis of Taylor Everson’s kidney injury came from the fact that there was no foul called on the play and the game was not stopped. There were two physicians staffing the game.
Now, I’ve never seen, in the third of a century I’ve covered sports, a mid-season course-correction of this type when it comes to officiating. Usually, the preseason interpretation meetings are enough to get the information from the central rulesmakers out to umpires and game officials.
And most decisions that rulesmakers make often take time to filter down to teams and groups of officials. Let’s hope what they do will mitigate the potential for another major injury.
TopOfTheCircle.com 
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