Fred, a U13 – U19 referee, asks:
A recreational youth player wearing religious headgear that covers her ears is questioned by the referee during the pre-match player equipment inspection, She states that she is not wearing any ear rings but is unwilling to show her ears or remove the head gear. The referee decides that the player cannot participate because he can not prove she is not wearing Jewelry.
Law 4 states a player must submit for inspection, right ? If so should a referee require a player to lift their shirt to check for belly piercings? How far should a referee go to discover uniform infractions in the pre-game?
Answer
We don’t wish to seem pretentious or to engage in pontification (OK, too late), but this is an extraordinarily important question because it involves the intersection of personal safety, freedom, and honor. Let’s start with some basics.
First, Law 4 does not state that “a player must submit for inspection.” It merely states that the wearing of jewelry (with certain very limited exceptions) is not permitted. Everything else is procedures and mechanics. For example, we personally get very irritated with referees who demand that players on a team line up and engage in some ludicrous Irish dance move where they must display the soles of their footwear and then tap on their shins. This is rather like being “penny wise and pound foolish” because it focuses on two specific things — illegal cleats (which are, for kids, almost vanishingly rare) and shinguards (the existence of which is easily determined by simply looking). Slapping the shins may demonstrate that the player has rhythm but does little to determine if the player has age-appropriate shinguards — which is far more likely a violation than not having shinguards at all.
Second, why no jewelry? Because it is a safety issue and that makes it important enough to be diligent in ensuring that Law 4 is followed. But, again, there are limits. The most common, easily understandable, and briefest definition of “inspect” is “to look at” — not uncover, probe, dig into, or discover. We personally experienced, early in our refereeing career, a match at the start of which it was easily confirmable by casual visual inspection that there was no jewelry being worn by anyone on either team. It rained and, as a result, thin white cotton jerseys became stuck to the skin and somewhat semi-transparent, which in turn made unavoidably obvious the fact that one of the players was wearing an item of navel (not naval) jewelry. With this new awareness, the referee advised the player that he/she (we’re being ambiguous here) could not continue to play while wearing the jewelry. Did anyone complain that this could have been avoided if the referee had just required all the players to bare their midriffs before the start of the game? No. And, in any event, that would potentially have the effect of implicitly recognizing that there are far more places than the navel for jewelry (thus leading down a path which we refuse to follow).
Your responsibility for safety issues raised by Law 4 has practical limitations that do not cover forcing, without evidence, a player to reveal otherwise lawfully covered places — i.e., it does not include doing searches that ordinarily would require a warrant.
Look at what can be seen. Require clear and reasonable evidence that something not permitted may be deliberately hidden. The specific facts here are a bit more complicated by the fact that the player was wearing an item of religious belief. This is not even remotely similar to seeing a piece of tape over an ear lobe. The tape is (a) prima facie evidence of a violation and (b) a violation in and of itself. Seeing it requires you to ask if it is covering anything (which usually elicits a positive response based on the common misconception that merely covering whatever is underneath makes it OK) and, if the answer is negative, then the player is advised that there should be no problem in removing it. If there is nothing underneath but a hole where a stud had been taken out, then allow the player to put the tape back on because then it is merely, in effect, a bandage covering a wound.
In the case of the religious headgear, there are numerous, sensible options other than declaring that the player cannot play because she cannot remove the headgear and thus prove that she doesn’t have anything illegal underneath it. Whatever happened to “innocent until proven guilty”? No player can ever, short of entirely disrobing, prove that he/she is not wearing anything illegal. What’s wrong with taking her word for it? It seems more likely to us that a player with sufficient character to be wearing something that otherwise draws attention is not likely to lie about jewelry. Or you could ask the player’s coach to attest to the absence of jewelry and note this in your game report. Frankly, doing either of these last two things would bring far more honor to the officiating profession.
