By Rod Symington, WSF Rules and Referees Committee
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|  Rod Symington is on the WSF Rules and Referees Committee and is a consultant on Rules and Refereeing to the USA. He has also been the Tournament Referee for, among others, the Women's Worlds, Pan Am Games, and Junior Men's and Women's Worlds. To contact Rod with questions or to enquire about clinics and his Squash Rules for Players, email him at symingto@uvic.ca |
Not so long ago (before May 1, 2001), life was simple. The so-called "Referee's Line of Thinking" in the previous version of the Rules of Squash contained only four simple questions. Then someone decided that more detail was necessary. And so life became a lot more complicated.
The "flowchart" that illustrates this column is reproduced from Appendix 4.1 of the new Rules of Squash (Please click here http://www.worldsquash.org/appendix_4.htm to see the flowchart). It will take you several minutes to read and digest it, and several weeks or months (or maybe a lifetime) to apply it correctly.
Although it is labeled "Referee's Line of Thinking" it really ought to be more generally described: it is the Line of Thinking for everyone on the squash court. (The label demonstrates the continuing pernicious bias of the Rules: they are written for referees, not players, even though on any given day 99 percent of the games of squash played do not have a referee.)
The chart is intended as a clear and logical guide to making a decision after a player has called "let" because of interference. The chart really is self-explanatory. You start at the top and work your way through it until you reach the "Decision" column. Once you have a decision, you stop right there; there is no need to go any further.
This chart is a very useful training device, but it would be impossible to expect anyone actually to apply it in "real time" on the court. If that were to happen, decisions would take forever! Can you imagine watching a referee trying to go through all these steps after a call of "let"? (Overly conscientious referees might carry a copy in their back pocket.)
Of course, such a chart is all well and good in theory. But its designer(s) knows little about the workings of the human mind. When a computer plays chess, it operates in a manner similar to this flowchart: because the computer cannot discriminate between stupid moves and good ones, it has to consider all the possible legal moves on the chessboard. (That's why you need a super-computer to play chess at a high level: it considers billions of moves before it makes a decision.) We humans are not computers: we possess a discriminating mental filter that eliminates the "silly" possibilities from consideration and we concentrate on the few viable ones.
In the application of this flowchart, we do not, in practice, go through every step it wants us to: instead we "jump" automatically to the step or steps that apply to the situation and make a decision. Here is an example: if I hit a shot and then stand in the way of my opponent's swing, the referee does not begin to apply the flowchart at the top ("Was there any interference? Was the interference minimal?"), but jumps immediately to the step that applies: "Did the interference prevent the player's reasonable swing?" In other words, the first six steps are ignored and a quick decision is made.
Nevertheless, this chart will help you make better decisions on the squash court--both as a player and as a referee. Future columns will discuss various aspects of this chart in greater detail, but for the moment it will suffice if you try to apply it generally to all situations on the squash court where play has stopped because a player felt that he or she had encountered interference. |
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