March 16, 2023 — A wanted course-correction

Keep in mind this?

Yesterday, a narrative got here out on ESPN.com that the Collegiate Ladies’s Lacrosse Officers Affiliation and the Intercollegiate Ladies’s Lacrosse Coaches Affiliation made the tightening of security guidelines in girls’s lacrosse agenda gadgets in current conferences.

Particularly, the dialogue surrounded stick-to-body contact, particularly in susceptible areas of the torso.

“I feel this harm caught everyone unexpectedly,” stated IWLCA government director Liz Robertshaw. “You don’t hear about this sort of factor usually.”

Apparently, neither did the NCAA. In accordance with the ESPN story, the classification of ladies’s lacrosse as a non-contact sport essentially implies that there are fewer medical personnel at girls’s video games than there are at males’s video games. In accordance with Stony Brook athletic director Shawn Heilbron, the 90-minute delay earlier than the analysis of Taylor Everson’s kidney harm got here from the truth that there was no foul referred to as on the play and the sport was not stopped. There have been two physicians staffing the sport.

Now, I’ve by no means seen, within the third of a century I’ve coated sports activities, a mid-season course-correction of this sort with regards to officiating. Often, the preseason interpretation conferences are sufficient to get the knowledge from the central rulesmakers out to umpires and sport officers.

And most selections that rulesmakers make usually take time to filter down to groups and teams of officers. Let’s hope what they do will mitigate the potential for an additional main harm.