Two years ago, the Coppell boys soccer team was marching toward a district title when a funny thing happened. The rules caught up with them.

Coppell plays in a notoriously stingy high school district in the Dallas, Texas area, notably alongside cross-sport juggernaut Southlake Carroll. The two had already waged one league battle in 2012, and with Coppell atop the league standings with precious few games left in the regular season, the return meeting was all-important. A win and Coppell would all but shut the door on their rivals. A loss and the race for a top playoff seed was flung wide open.

Southlake Carroll managed to nose ahead on an early goal, and with about 15 minutes to go, the referee on the field signaled to the clock operator in the press box for a stoppage in play. In National Federation of State High School Association (NFHS) rules, the official time isn’t kept on the field - it’s kept with the clock operator in the press box, who’s almost always hooked into the stadium’s video board. The reliability of the system relies on the connection between the two. And the clock isn’t continuous. It stops for things like injuries, fouls and substitutions, which also means there's no added time at the end of each half. 

In this instance, the clock operator missed the call on the field and let about 15 seconds bleed off the clock before realizing the mistake and mashing his finger down on the button. To compensate, the referee told Coppell coach Chad Rakestraw he’d hold the ensuing throw-in for about that amount of time - official game time - to allow the clock to catch up to the unofficial time he’d kept on the field. 

This became important later. With about 12 seconds left in regulation, Coppell earned a deep throw-in and appeared to score an important tying goal with one second showing on the game clock. Suddenly the Southlake Carroll coach tore off toward the referee to make the case that the time they’d kept during that designed run-off 15 minutes earlier wasn’t perfectly aligned with the time in the booth. By his count, the clock had already run out. There shouldn’t have been a second left on the clock. The game should’ve been over already.

The referee was swayed by the evidence. He called off the goal and called the game for Southlake Carroll, 1-0. Coppell eventually won district anyway, but the scenario always stuck with Rakestraw. And it isn’t the only one.

“That one, but also the card thing, where you have to go off (the field for a short time after receiving a yellow card),” said Rakestraw, who guided Coppell to a Class 5A state title in 2013. “There’s no point to it. The kid comes right back on at the next stoppage anyways. I would say those are really the two main things that bother me as a high school coach.”

Until the fall of 2013, all 51 states (NFHS also counts Washington D.C.) utilized NFHS’s rule set in its entirety for high school soccer. It’s different to the FIFA system in a few notable ways, and it’s also divergent in others to the relative rules goulash used by college soccer. The NFHS allows unlimited subs (which are not restricted to halves like in college), uses 40 minute halves during which the clock drains down instead of counts up, forces players off the field between stoppages after accruing a yellow card, and, as Rakeshaw learned the hard way, keeps the official time with a clock operator instead of with the referee on the field.

Some even more antiquated rules are only now just being phased out on a state-by-state level. Until 2013, Texas used a running penalty shootout, where instead of spot kicks, players had a 35-yard breakaway they had to unload in five seconds. MLS eliminated an identical system in 1999 after it fell out of favor with the public.

“Our state uses NFHS, but I don’t know what their reasoning would be on the difference in some of those rules,” Rakestraw said. “I can understand the subs one, but I don’t understand the other ones at all. I mean, we have 40 minute halves in high school. For a varsity team with 16 to 18-year-old kids, it doesn’t make any sense.”

One state agreed with Rakestraw to such an extent that it became the first to go rogue on NFHS’s complete soccer rule set since it began putting them down in 1970. In the fall, the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association (WIAA) opted to essentially split its rulebook in half between the FIFA laws and those from the NFHS. In essence, the WIAA goes by FIFA rules when the ball is in play and NFHS rules during stoppages (things like injury protocols and free substitutions). Notably, in the WIAA, official time is now kept by the referee on the field.

One of the advantages as the state saw it was increasing the number of talented local officials, a constant push even up to the professional levels as American refereeing continues to find its footing. Referees don’t get FIFA accreditation for working high school games under NFHS laws, but that’s now changed in the WIAA, the only state where that’s applicable. It also allowed them to smooth the transition to the club level.

“By doing so, we increase the number of officials, primarily good officials, who are willing to officiate high school soccer,” said John Miller, an assistant executive director for the WIAA. “One of the others was, most of our officials, coaches and players are playing club soccer as well as high school soccer, and to standardize the rules for them we thought would be an advantage.”

The only sticking point was keeping free substitutions, which makes more sense when considering the relative lack of parity, and thus higher frequency of blowouts in high school when compared to most levels of elite club play. Florida utilizes an immediate 8-0 “run rule” policy, but that’s still a rarity nationwide. Washington began this policy in the fall with girls soccer and is now in the midst of its spring boys season, and Miller says the transition has been as smooth as they’d have hoped.

For the NFHS, though, the WIAA’s decision was a bit of a blindside.

“We were shocked when they had decided to go down this route,” said Mark Koski, the director of sports, events and development at the NFHS. “They felt like that was best for their membership and ultimately we support the state associations. However, it’s our goal that our membership, which the WIAA is part of, follows the rules which they help write.”

The NFHS has an all-sport committee that meets once a year to mull over somewhere typically between 50 to 60 proposed rule changes. The 11-person committee made up of representatives from across the nation operates somewhat like a Supreme Court, presiding over rule changes proposed from within a country it divvies into eight sections. In addition to those eight, one coaching rep, one refereeing rep and a committee chair round out the group. And while the WIAA didn’t lose NFHS sanctioning by becoming the first state to only partially use its soccer laws, it did lose a representative on the rules committee. 

This of course begs the question of whether this has any further traction nationwide. Might more associations be making similarly subtle moves toward some day adopting a fuller FIFA rules system at the high school level? Koski says that day probably isn’t so close.

“It definitely has not gained any steam. It was kind of an isolated state,” Koski said. “There’s no other states that’ve spoken about it to me. It was a decision Washington felt was best for their state association. It would be our goal for them to potentially look at our great process and change rules they’d like to see changed, versus utilizing a second set of rules. Ultimately they could be put into a situation to where if something happens in a game and they’re not following the national standard for high school sports, they could be called out for that.” 

Meanwhile, coaches like Rakestraw hope to enact some change on whatever level they can. The problem could be that the stakes, and thus the interest, simply isn’t high enough in relation to other sports. Rakestraw approached the director of the UIL (the state sanctioning body for high school sports in Texas) about clock changes last year and never heard back.

“I know these things would have the coaches’ support,” Rakestraw said. “From a soccer standpoint some of these rules don’t make sense. But it’s not necessarily that they don’t want to do it, it’s just that they think, why change anything and create any controversy or any trouble? When the rules are actually the thing causing trouble.”