Editorial Policy

What we require of ourselves before a page goes live, and what we do when we get something wrong.

Sourcing

Every rule statement is traceable to a published rule, interpretation or case book. Where state associations differ from the NFHS baseline — and on shot clocks, game length and court specifications they frequently do — we say which body we are describing rather than presenting one state’s practice as universal.

We do not publish a factual claim on a single source where a second is obtainable. Where a fact cannot be confirmed, we say it is unconfirmed rather than filling the gap with an estimate presented as fact.

We do not reproduce other publications’ wording. Where we have read a competing explanation of a rule, we take the subject and check it against the rulebook ourselves.

Review and dating

Rules change. Every rules page carries the date it was last reviewed against the current rulebook, separate from its original publication date, and is re-checked at the start of each season and whenever a relevant rule change is published.

Pages first published in 2013–2018 are not edited to reflect current rules; their body text stands as written, and they carry a notice telling the reader to check the current rulebook. Where a rule described in one of them has since changed, that belongs in a current page, not a silent rewrite of the record.

Attribution

Older pages keep the byline and date they were published with. New work is credited to whoever wrote it. We do not attribute new writing to those earlier contributors, and we do not present editorial staff as certified officials.

AI assistance

We use software tools in research and drafting. A person is responsible for every published page: the rule citations, the numbers and the judgement calls are checked against primary sources before publication, and the accountability for an error is ours regardless of how the draft was produced. We do not publish machine-generated text that has not been checked this way.

Images

Diagrams are our own. Photographs are used only where we hold or can verify the right to use them. We do not publish photographs of identifiable high school athletes — see our policy on covering high school athletes.

Commercial disclosure

Where a page contains a link that earns us a commission, it is marked as such on that page. Commercial relationships never determine what we recommend in a rules explanation, and we carry no gambling advertising of any kind — see the policy page above for why.