Last night at a junior’s scrimmage this happened: A junior jammer attempted to remove their star to hand it to their pivot. The jammer was unable to remove their star. The pivot got tired of waiting, and pulled the star off their jammer’s helmet. Is this an incomplete star pass or an illegal star pass?
The key thing here to me is mentioned in Scenario C2.2.4.B - “a Star Pass is a single point of exchange: the moment at which the Star is released.” The actual removal of the Star from the Jammer’s helmet doesn’t really matter for determining if the Star Pass was complete.
Was the Jammer still holding the Star with their hand in the instant before it came fully into the Pivot’s control? If so that sounds like a complete Star Pass.
If however the Jammer let go while it was still on their head and the Pivot simply removed it themselves, that’s incomplete. It is legal for the Pivot to control the Star, so I’d treat that the same as if the Pivot had picked it up from the floor. As long as they don’t put it on their head, they’re fine.
I’ll note that my thoughts here are based on WFTDA rules. I don’t think that any of the JRDA Addendum stuff changes this, but my knowledge and experience there is extremely limited.
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There are two competing philosophies in the rules regarding Star Passes.
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A Star Pass is the hand-to-hand transfer of the helmet cover from Jammer to Pivot. Anything other than that is Not a “Star Pass”.
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A Star Pass is when the helmet cover is transferred from the Jammer to the Pivot by any means.
The first is the more current thinking, and the second is a remnant of older times when the rules around star passes were far (far) more complicated. Unfortunately there are still echoes of that older philosophy in a couple of places, most notably where it says that throwing the star is an incomplete star pass, not an illegal one. Were it not for that one line (which we should really change), the rules might be completely consistent with the first way of thinking.
Assuming that the Jammer did not have the cover in their grasp, and the Pivot just yoinked it right off of their head…
It’s most consistent with most of the rules to say that’s just… not a Star Pass. There isn’t anything explicitly illegal about the Pivot removing the Jammer’s helmet cover (2.2.2 says that a Jammer loses Lead Jammer eligibility if the Pivot removes their cover, but conspicuously doesn’t say anything about it being a penalty or even illegal.)
If you have to call it a Star Pass, it’s certainly an incomplete one. But in other cases where the only result of the failed pass is that the Pivot is holding a helmet cover, there’s no impact. The Pivot is entitled to control the star (whether they can legally put it on or not).
To my current thinking, nothing illegal was described in the scenario.
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Thanks everyone. When I looked at the rules I agree it was clearly incomplete. But when I read the list of illegal star pass examples, the action felt more similar to those, so I thought I’d ask. It was very funny to watch it happen - the pivot’s face was priceless - “FFS I’ll just take it myself”