Stalling calls are something that High School officials have a hard time making consistanty. Now look at colligate officials and they make the call much more consistantly. Any ideas why? Does anyone think this correlates with the consistancy of stalemate calls? THis keeps the action going. I have always felt that stalling is a call that has been treated as a judgement call and not a rule book call. It is defined pretty clearly. The biggest mistake made at the high school level is the fact that it is not called consitantly until the end of the season and at the end of matches.
Perhaps stalling in the neutral position, but certainly NOT in the offensive wrestler position. In fact you can actually earn a point in college for "riding" which at the high school level is often classified as stalling. In my opinion stalling isn't called as consistently at the high school level, because each official sees things a little differently than others. In the western part of the state they believe that running a 2 on 1 and attempting a tilt every 15-25 seconds means they are working for a fall, whereas those on the eastern part of the state expect the top man to work off the hips. And that is not to suggest fault with wrestlers or coaches regardless of situation, it is simply the style of wrestling that has been allowed.
In may be of interest for people to realize that the NFHS Wrestling Rule book does NOT mention a stipulation of the offensive wrestler moving off of his opponents hips. You simply won't find it in writing on the rules book. This however is the metric that many officials across the state use to judge stalling, and frankly as long as that is consistant among officials everywhere, then it shouldn't really be a controversial situation.
The reason why people perceive differences in the way stalling is called in the post season is because different officials from different parts of the state referee those tournaments whereas during the regular season it is typical the same group of officials refereeing the same tournament.
