RULE CHANGES

OLLEGE BASKETBALL has made tremendous
strides in the last decade. It has improved in
spectator appeal, in playing technique and officiat-
ing. But what, to this writer at least, is more impor-
tant, is that it has destroyed the provincial barriers
which for so long prevented normal development
of the sport along intersectional lines.

True, the game still has sectional characteristics
attributable to various coaching philosophies and
types of personnel. These add to, rather than de-
tract from, the value of basketball as a sport and
spectacle. But only in recent years has it been pos-
sible for a team to go far afield from its native
habitat and be certain that it will be able to play
its game without having to overcome handicaps
imposed by purely local rules interpretations.

When the National Basketball Committee re-
wrote and clarified the blocking or screening rule
a few years ago, it removed the last obstacle in the
path of happy intersectional relations. Of course,
there are still some sections and some conferences
which choose to ignore-or modify this part of the
playing code to suit their own peculiar ideas or
supposed needs. These private interpretations,
though, are generally reserved for closed competi-
tion.

There has been a general striving for competent,
fair administration of games. Officials’ boards and
associations have done valuable work in the bring-
ing of this policy to fruition. There is no place in
basketball for the “homer” and the “politician.”
Interpretations are clear. Ambiguities have been
cleaned out of the rule book. There is no longer
any excuse for a referee to call them one way in
New York and another in Chicago or San F'ran-
cisco. You don’t have to go back very far in your
memory to recall the time when varying interpre-

EVERETT B. MORRIS, Basketball writer,
New York Herald Tribune.

HELPED THE GAME

tations were a matter sometimes of county and
even city lines, much less state boundaries.

There can be no argument against the assertion
that clear wording of the rules, uniform interpre-
tation thereof and the exercise of fairness and good
judgment in their administration have contributed
most importantly to the scope of the college game.

Always, of course, there have been intersectional
contests. Never, though, has the schedule been so
studded with them as in the last ten years. Pacific
Coast teams are no strangers to the Eastern sea-
board. The Middle Westerners travel in all direc-
tions. The East has sent its representatives into the
Midlands and the South.

Coaches have a keener appreciation of their col-
leagues’ problems. Players from the great wide
open spaces have a healthy respect for the skill of
the city boys. Lads from the urban areas admire the
speed and drive of the outlanders. Each learns from
the other. Thus you find sections once wholly
devoted to playing a game based on adroit ball
handling and fakery, leavening their operations
with aggressivenes and the lightning break from
defense to offense. Boys whose conception of the
game ran only to continuous driving now get clever-
ness and deception into their play.

The game is better to look at. It is more interest-
ing to play. Teams once confined to tiny, outmoded
gymnasia now perform in Madison Square Garden
and huge field houses.

Give the credit for the change in attitude to the
pioneer promoters of intersectional matches, to the
coaches who had the courage and foresight to in-
vade strange territory and to those who had the
vision to see basketball as a game far too big for
the petty jealousies and chauvinism which once
throttled its development.

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