Rules recently published this Statement on Illegal Holding

The Rules Committee Theory Panel has been monitoring a potential issue over the last two years and feels the time has come to make a public statement providing direction.

The Rules of Flat Track Roller Derby detail a number of ways to legally and illegally block. The Rules cannot exhaustively catalog all possible forms of contact, and there will remain gray areas. However the absence of a specific prohibition does not implicitly make an action legal. The action must be evaluated in the spirit of the sport and in line with other similar actions.

Legal forms of blocking do not include grasping or holding an opponent even if the contact is made using legal blocking and/or target zones. This illegal hold can take several forms including intentionally trapping an opponent’s arm, or as has been observed in some recent play, encircling an opponent’s leg. The latter of which is a dangerous and unfair tactic. A skater must be able to disengage from a one-on-one block without breaking an opponent’s hold.

It is within the Referees' discretion to penalize these illegal holds as Unsporting Conduct.

https://forum.wftda.com/index.php?topic=22035.0

Officials should avoid attracting unnecessary attention to their appearance.

I feel the need to push back on this a bit. I might not have been around the sport very long, but I've already seen female and trans refs with some bright eye shadow and lipstick. Refs put stickers on their helmets, too. Kilts are not nearly as practical as athletic shorts or track pants. We're all wearing ridiculous aliases on our back (many of which are not very family friendly). We're doing our part to draw some attention already.

Part of what got me into the sport was seeing how inclusive it was and how the athletes (and to a lesser extent refs) were allowed their self-expression to celebrate their contribution to this sport. Everyone wasn't just another uniform and number, people (including refs) took pride in their "derby look." It all adds to the pageantry of the sport that differentiates it from the traditions and pageantry of other sports. I respect a head ref that doesn't want it. I'm not gonna want to wear facepaint when it's gonna be a real hassle (e.g. a tournament or cutting it close between arrival and whistle). But I also feel like as with the rest of what we're wearing that as long as it isn't offensive or indicates bias then more power to that individual.

Head ref call. I have disallowed face paint at all games for a long time. There is nothing saying that this is necessary, but we typically go by the [https://static.wftda.com/officiating/officiating-uniform-policy.pdf]tournament officiating dress code[/url]. This does not explicitly cover face paint, but face paint is very far outside of the clear intent of the dress code that it doesn't need to be in there.

My recommendation would be to stop using face paint for all games, unless you only want to ref home games. I promise that you will lose opportunities because people don't think you take this seriously, even if that isn't true.

We don't give a penalty if that action was directly caused by another illegal action. For example, a red blocker is back blocked by an white jammer, which causes red blocker to fall through the legs of white blocker, making white blocker fall. In that case, white jammer would receive a back block penalty, but there would be no low block penalty, because that contact was caused by the illegal action of the white jammer.

What you describe here does not sound like that at all. It sounds like the skater saw she was about to receive contact from an opponent (maybe she knew that contact would be illegal, maybe not), and decided to react by counter-blocking with her forearms. That counter-block was not caused by the illegal contact from an opponent, but an active decision. Based on that, both the direction of gameplay and the forearms should be judged individually based on impact.

In short: "reacting to" is not the same as "caused by"

The clarification you are thinking of was from before there was such a thing as ceding a cut. It referenced an incident where at the beginning of a jam one jammer knocked the other jammer OOB to the outside and started skating clockwise for a runback.  The OOB jammer crawled across the track to the inside to avoid skating the much longer distance on the outside of the track.  Rules clarified that under that ruleset that action should be a penalty (I believe it was Skating Out Of Bounds).

The action you describe, I do not see a penalty there.

For the variation where a skater gets knocked to the outside, re-enters, then exits to the inside to cede;  it depends on context.

Context 1: Rookie scrimmage to get people fresh out of boot camp some game experience. The skating skills are probably such that it is quicker and easier for them to exit to the inside than to stop, turn around, and exit to the outside.  In that case I do not see a penalty to issue there either.

Context 2a:  Sanctioned game with post season ramifications. Those skaters I expect to have the skating skills to stop, turn around, and cede properly.  If the skater did not realize they stepped out, and as soon as their teammate told them, they exited the closest way.  Maybe not a penalty, but maybe depending on how long they were in bounds before exiting.

Context 2b: Same as 2a except they are trying to skirt the rules and unfairly shorten the distance they have to skate to re-enter legally, like the example in that now defunct clarification.  This one is probably a penalty.


The current ruleset format gives us some leeway to consider if the skater is trying to play legally and make things right. Or, are they trying to gain an unfair advantage when deciding whether or not to penalize.