Takeaway for me is the importance of the wing to get to 0. And for youngers or centers to not jump forward from closer than 3 or 4m.
100% agreed @Polonewb . A LHA needs to get to the goal line at the 5 position to ensure that a pass to center is not seen as forward (warning, though, a RHA playing 4/5 needs to be careful because a ref at 2m might like to call the RHA’s right arm over the end line for a turnover). I’ve seen this called incorrectly when the pass is forward from a player swimming from 4 to 5 to a teammate at 1 driving to 2 post who receives and shoots outside 2m (as in, the follow through splashes down at 2m), which is always possible if the near court ref (almost always usually on the 4/5 side when using both sides of the pool) is behind the play and cannot clearly determine that the pass was (a) forward and (b) to a player inside the goal area.
It does seem to me that refs on the deck (not elevated) have an even harder time to define the 2M area (box with undefined corners in the water). If a player is driving/lunging forward approaching the not clearly defined corner in the water the back court ref might have a better angle, but it is the front court refs call.
I really wish we could create laser lines in the water to help resolve these issues. At high level matches they could be dual purpose to display mascot logos or flags during intermission. Golf, football, baseball have interesting technologies for replay, but actual lines in the water would be so much better.
Or an AI reff from live 
drone footage
Cable cam might be an easier implementation than drone given the properties that host most games… but I agree. A big hurdle is how to get AI to not call the rules as written.
Being somewhat familiar with LLM training, the AI might resort to not calling anything (or everything) given the conflicts in data (videos). Not sure AI could be sophisticated enough at present to account for context like a good ref does. I think just annotating the videos prior to training would be comically dangerous.
so many rule changes even in the past 5-10 years alone make it extremely difficult for refs to keep up, retired players to become refs, and for current players/coaches to understand what will be called vs not
- 6 meter instead of 5 meter threshold for outside shots
- foul outside of 6, player can put ball in play and shoot
- 7 on 6, goalies allowed past half
- 2 meter goal area vs line
- foul inside 6, player can swim out of 6 and shoot
- corner throw direct shot
- inclusion of the calling fouls for simulation
- automatic 5 meter if defender touches player with ball from behind
you can go even further back and remember the two hand shot blocking and the shot clock being 35-45 seconds long
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What’s the purpose of being an “arbiter” if you can’t be “arbitrary”? [tongue firmly planted in cheek]
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Folks, let’s move the discussion about rules and officiating to a new thread, so we can let the focus of this thread be on the boys’ high school season.
Thanks.
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@jeff can you make a new category for tracking the comments as well?
From polofan:
Not sure what thread this belongs in but looks like Jett Taylor -->CNAB..
https://www.instagram.com/p/DdYtEZ4jbYK/?stkn=NjZiM2M3MzIxNA==
That is super cool. That’s the CNAB pro team and he’s playing on it as a senior in high school?!
Congrats to Jett and kudos not just for being good enough to do this but to also be willing to take what I would think was a bit of a leap of faith…certainly unprecedented at least. Hoping it’s a great experience for him
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It was around this time last year CIF-SS released their first round of rankings. Any insight if they will do that again this year? I know over the last two years there was a lot of speculation about teams jockeying to drop into lower divisions based on these rankings.
I’ve been hitting refresh as well. Interested to see outside of the TOP 25 that Jeff and Joel put together here or the Top 10 on OC register. Max preps rankings are still horrible at this point
Maxpreps is only as good as the crowd sourced data. I looked at multiple schools that had no roster and wrong coaches. Seems like garbage in to me.
Just for fun I went to this old site and saw it was updated once again.
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I had Newport a few spots higher, but other than that, looks pretty good! 
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Cate over Oaks hahahahahha, sorry you have bad incomplete data will work itself out!