[kmcclary]

Welcome to the 2014 Build Season! Oh boy... It sure didn't take long this year for the comments to start flying... (Luckily, I work with several teams. To protect the guilty, I'm not saying at which one this happened. :-)

Scene: Kickoff Saturday 2014, back at the ranch that very afternoon.
The entire team was doing their traditional "group aloud reading of the new FIRST Game Manual", to review the game rules together...

We get to Rule G34, and all progress stops for about 10 minutes...

FIRST wrote:
"Rule G34 - COACHES may not touch BALLS.
Inadvertent or inconsequential contact will not be penalized.
Violation: FOUL"

The room suddenly goes silent. Internally I thought: "Oh crap... What were the manual writers thinking, phrasing it that way to high school students? Are we ever going to sneak past this one?"

... Not a chance, with this group...

Sure enough. It started with a few stifled snickers... Tension builds.
Suddenly, the entire team explodes with riotous laughter.

... "Yea, that's VERY foul all right..."
... "Of course you're not supposed to do that. Everybody knows that!"
Etc.

Finally, after everyone got a shot at the rule, I thought we were home free.
No such luck. They then all turned and stared directly toward their on-field coach... Oh oh... Round 2...

After a pregnant pause, the comments started flying again...
... "Hey Coach... We told you not to scratch yourself so much!"
... "He's so famous, FIRST even wrote in a rule against it this year!"
Etc...

Once THAT died down, Round 3 happened... A student then turned and asked the mentors:
... "Hey {mentors}... When handling your balls, what constitutes 'inconsequential contact' ?"
This started an entire sub-discussion among the students on "ball handling and underwear straightening etiquette" in and around school, the field, and elsewhere.

Chaos reigned for several more minutes.

One of the new female students near me looked around, totally bewildered at the pandemonium in the room. She then realized the gender of most of the commenters. With an "eye roll" expression on her face, she turned to another young female student on the team, sighed, and summed it up nicely:

... "Of course... There are waaay too many guys on this team..."

And that is when *I* lost it...

The only sensible thing the mentors could do was to keep quiet and wait it out. Eventually it died down. Decorum was restored, and we could continue with the manual reading session.

But from then on, things went more slowly. Every mention of "balls" was accompanied with at least a few stifled snickers, and sotto voce comments. Example: When talking about "retrieving your ball from the pedestal when lit", you can imagine the "loudly whispered" comments ("Ooooo...That sounds painful", "What a relief", "Hey, if you tried to light mine up, I'd retrieve them too..."..., etc.)

Needless to say, we finally ran out of time and gave up.
We had to ask everyone to read the rest of the rules at home.


Didn't any other team notice this one? What happened when your team encountered Rule G34?

- Keith