Secretary-rules editors field hundreds of calls per year -- often 10 to 20 in a day. With a caller pool that large, there figures to be one or two that come from left field, or sometimes from completely out of the park.

While even the most bizarre requests generally are well-intentioned, they often do provide hard-working secretary-rules editors with a bit of comic relief.

Softball SRE Dee Abrahamson had one from a coach who was just trying to make her team happy.

"An early version of one of our rules required jersey numbers to be between 0 and 99," said Abrahamson, an associate athletics director at Northern Illinois University. "I got a call from a coach with three student-athletes who liked the number 1. One of those players picked jersey No. 1, another picked jersey No. 11, and the third, an incoming freshman, wanted to be point one, which, technically, was between 0 and 99. I said while this is an interpretation, we are not going to introduce someone as, 'Now batting, number one-tenth, Suzy Smith.'

Abrahamson said, as with many interpretations, the next year the Softball Rules Committee changed the rule to whole numbers between 0 and 99.

Barbara Kalbus, the SRE for water polo, once was asked whether "white" really means "white" for the visiting team caps. "Yes, I said, 'white' means 'white,' " Kalbus said.

Longtime soccer SRE Cliff McCrath, who has a pretty good sense of humor himself, said he got a laugh from one coach whose school was a dual member of the NCAA and the NAIA and had enough soccer players to field a team in each organization. "He says, 'What's wrong with us entering a team in both organizations?' " McCrath said. "I paused probably for the longest time I've ever paused, because I had to determine whether I would break out in my usual paint-peeling laughter or whether I would have to gasp four or five more times while wondering how that question ever got formed."

Perhaps the best and most innocent example comes from rifle SRE Ed Etzel, who had a caller ask: "Do we need to use the current rule book or are old ones OK?"

Well, at least the guy gave it a shot.

-- Gary T. Brown