This weekend I did not ref much but my daughter had her first couple of games, where she was an AR for U10 rec. That was fun and interesting at the same time. At halftime I had to tell her to focus on one thing and one thing only, the 2nd to last defender. She was trying to remember to do all the things she was supposed to do and it was getting in the way of just focusing on the basics. She seemed to get things going when she was working only on one thing. Then she added one thing after that and by the second match, she was doing fine.
But that is not what this post is about. This weekend, in my daughter's game, we were playing at home and I was just a parent for this one, no ref garb. We were setting up the the field when the team manager comes over and asks me if at U12 teams can still use guest players. I immediately thought that they couldn't in WAGS because the results matter now. It is not a seeding season, it is the season where results count, so stacking kids is sort of a no-no, I thought. Just to be sure, I called a person who happened to be in front of a PC, brought up the rules of the competition and we found out that indeed, you can have guest players at U12, but only from a lower seeded team at the same club (so if you have a Division 1 team, and Division 3 team and a Division 5 team, the D5 players can guest on the D3 or D1 team and D3 can guest for D1 but D1 players cannot guest down to D3 or D5).
The other rule is that they can only play in one WAGS game per day, so if they played in their own team's game that day, they may not participate in another game regardless. So you might ask, how did you know whether these players that were coming in as guests were from the higher or lower ranked teams on the same club? Quite simple actually, most teams allocate jersey numbers to teams when they are created. Something like this: A team gets 01-20, B team gets 21-40 and C team gets 41-60 for example. We knew that this team was their B team. Well, all the girls who were on the official roster (not the ones written in at the last minute) played with numbers in the 20s and 30s. The 3 guest players? You guessed it, 8, 10 and 2.
We had caught them trying to cheat and add A team players to a B team match. A clear violation of the rules. This is where the team manager and I disagreed on how to proceed. I was of the idea to let them play and then we are declared the winners (but you have to file a protest), she wanted to confront the manager prior to the start of the game. She decided to confront the manager, who initially pulled out an edited version of the rules of the league that did not contain the verbiage in question (about A team players not being allowed to play down, so they knew they were cheating) and when our manager showed her on her cell phone the correct verbiage, she backed down and scratched the players out.
The game ended 2-2 and that tells you that the three guest players were there to pad the B team. I really hope that we can come down hard on cheating like this because it stinks that people try to cheat and it is something that referees need to know about because it goes on more than we know. We normally arrive at the time of the game and handle the things within the field, but since they ask us to certify we saw a roster and player cards as well, we probably need to know in more detail under what circumstances players can or cannot play. What this team was hoping for was that the other manager wouldn't notice or the referee know the rules behind guest playing in a certain age group and then hoping that when the results are sent, that whether a player actually played or not would be lost in the details.
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