I would also love to see the circular arm motion and rolling whistle to make a return. It eliminated confusion and was inclusive for our HOH participants on and off the track.
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Last weekend, with one of the loudest, clearest, most by-the-book JTs I have ever worked with, this happened twice.
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I am strongly against removing the timeout-ending whistle in any scenario:
- There will be no more accidental jam-starts from trigger-happy skaters (good), but there will be a lot more skaters who don’t hear the “five second” warning because they weren’t listening for it.
- Inconsistency in whistling : some JTs will always whistle the end of a timeout, others will be much more choosy. Should this become a discussion in every Captain Meeting so that the teams know what to expect?
- WonderZebra already mentioned this, but a significant reason we use whistles is so that everyone knows that we are about to resume play. The audience can sit back in their seats, the track-repair people can leave the track, the medics can take their places. A five-second warning is always quieter than a whistle, and is much harder to be heard by everyone if they’re not already paying attention.
- What do the bench coaches think? A coach who wants to take a second TTO after the first TTO has to wait until the first one has ended, normally this is obvious because there will be a whistle announcing the end of the timeout. If you remove the whistle you make it harder for bench coaches to plan their TTOs or ORs.
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but there will be a lot more skaters who don’t hear the “five second” warning because they weren’t listening for it
We can’t know this unless we try, right? Have you tried this and found this to be a problem? I think there are currently many skaters who don’t hear or don’t remember the long rolling whistle (because it was up to 30 seconds ago), and they are all ready to go when the jam starts.
some JTs will always whistle the end of a timeout, others will be much more choosy
This seems pretty similar to how JTs are currently allowed the discretion to decide how long between the whistle and the jam-start, if all the skaters are ready. So I don’t think this is really a change.
but a significant reason we use whistles is so that everyone knows that we are about to resume play
This is a great point, but also, they face the same problem as the skaters. They are interrupted and startled by a whistle that they think has started the jam, when they actually have 1-30 more seconds before the jam actually starts.
There is definitely a “better safe than sorry” aspect here, but both sides are unsafe. Unexpected jam starts, versus unexpected gameplay when the jam hasn’t actually started.
What do the bench coaches think?
Would love to hear a bench coach’s opinion in this thread, but, I think a bench coach that wants a TTO or an OR following another clock stoppage is unlikely to have their skaters be on the track, which means there would be a rolling whistle, right? That is easy for them to ensure.
No, I strongly disagree on that.
If I’m over on SBO or working in the PB and there’s a timeout, I’m actively listening for that end of timeout whistle. That’s the signal that tells me to be ready and waiting to start the next jam. If somehow it did happen, it’s easy to fix because the scoreboard has an Un-start Jam button, and the PBT paperwork tells you how many seconds the skater has left at the end of a jam.
If however the rolling whistle was skipped, that’s a good chance that I won’t hear the five seconds shout. That means the jam and period clocks will start late, or the paused penalty times will start late. That’s a significant impact. It’s much harder to accurately fix missing the start of a jam, than accidentally a timer early.
If people are taking the rolling whistle to mean start of jam, that’s a training issue. But that’s fine, we have ways to deal with it. Early Hit penalties if they engage before the jam started. False Starts, Delay of Game, or Illegal Position penalties if they aren’t in the right place when the jam actually starts. Misconduct if other dangerous stuff is going on due to their negligence. They need to learn what happens at the end of a timeout, and react appropriately. We shouldn’t be changing procedures in a way that means some people won’t be ready when the jam starts and could impact the game just because some people are responding incorrectly to a whistle.
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As an alternative way of looking at this could we maybe somehow change the whistles so no one could reasonably confuse the timeout ending for a jam start? That would allow us the benefits of both sides, keeping the whistle for clarity but avoiding people thinking the jam started.
I don’t know exactly how this would be achieved. Having a second whistle with a distinctly different sound? Changing the jam start to be a series of whistles like a countdown? This might be too complicated but I wanted to throw it out there as an option to consider.
The games I’m at don’t have the problem of skaters starting on a long whistle in the first place, so for me there is nothing that needs testing.
Before recommending a rules change, I would suggest you investigate why some (many?) regions don’t seem to have this problem compared to the games you are watching. I feel like Europe doesn’t have this issue on the whole, so maybe there are some regional differences in how teams handle timeouts, or how JTs are whistling, etc.
And why are there so many skaters who are ready to start playing before the timeout’s ended in your region? Again I feel like this is something we don’t see much in Europe.
I could suggest that this is because European teams were used to seeing the scoreboard display either “timeout” or “lineup” (a regional practice that has been banned by WFTDA this year), so there was zero uncertainty about knowing if the timeout was still active or not. But I have no real way of knowing why we are not seeing the same problems you are seeing, only that we are somehow managing to avoid the problem while still following the current rules.
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Reinforcing @blind.io, I believe that optional/discretionary signals are an antipattern, because they are likely to generate diverging regional conventions that then cause confusion when officials and teams go outside their regions. Additionally, such diverging practices consume valuable time and attention that should preferably be focused on gameplay or higher-impact concerns.
I’m open to the thesis that we need to better control “false jam starts”, but not persuaded. I’m definitely against the proposed remedy.
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Heavily disagree. Because people are on the track and somewhat in position, does NOT mean they are ‘ready to go’. A sudden 5 seconds warning is not enough for most skaters to really take that position and be ready for the jam starting whistle.
The TO ending whistle is not an issue in my European neck of the woods either, except for rookie scrimmages.
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This would make it harder as a single whistle will trigger the ‘jam start’ brain for most people. The rolling whistle, if done right, should be clear, no? If someone has time and energy perhaps they can see where things go wrong (outside of rookie games), lol.
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For context, my experience has a lot of new/b-c games. I have found that there is little consistency in signaling the ending of time outs and restart of gameplay from one game to another. I believe that having the same procedure everytime, everywhere would be helpful in training skaters to understand and respond to the return to play cadence. Much as jam start is always expected to be: 5 seconds…short whistle, so return to play should be say: next whistle ends the time out, rolling whistle with spinning finger hand signal, <25sec- 5 seconds. If this consistentsy is maintained, taught and expected I feel there would be less confusion save of course the noisy venue where nothing can be heard clearly.
Y’all have convinced me that JT discretion to “just not do the whistle” is not the right move here so thank you for that. The argument of “it’s not just for the folks on the track” is quite compelling.
There are two things I’ve been thinking about since starting this thread that could help. The first is “whistle hygiene.” The jam starting whistle should be short – and thus hard to confuse a long-rolling whistle with it. But many JTs worldwide are using long whistles to start jams. Short is, like a single tweet in a lead call or a calloff. Long is, like a penalty. Without standardizing milliseconds, this is something an officiating crew needs to gel on – when a JT jam-start whistle is as long as the refs’ penalty whistles, it is incorrect. By lengthening it, it teaches skaters that long whistles start jams, which leads to long-rolling whistles incorrectly starting jams.
The second is simply that when skaters are all poised and ready to go – that’s the moment of risk. At that point I think we probably need non-standard language, as in, real language to distract the skaters to make them listen to what is being said, like “hey – this is NOT going to start the jam, don’t start skating, this isn’t it” or something similar that is communicative but harder to ignore than standardized language that just goes in one ear and out the other. Standardizing non-standard language isn’t new – three-star officiating verbal cues are encouraged to use “normal English” to communicate something if a penalty isn’t standardized.
What do you think?
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