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I fault the coaches and refs for things like that by pmcdnd96

Unless there's a hurricane, the refs know the only thing the kids are choosing is receive or defer.

9th grade used to be the year a lot of kids first stepped on the football field. At my high school, we used to rotate captains every week for the freshman and JV teams. Accordingly, every once in a while, a kid who had no idea what he was doing was responsible for making n-field calls to the ref. And poor Gerard. He was a really tough kid, but wasn't the brightest kid on our team. In the same game, he chose to kick off and later chose to accept a penalty rather than the result of the play, which was a fumble recovery by our defense. I don't think either of those were his fault. Our coach failed to explain that the term he needed to use at the coin toss was "defer" and the referee who made him make the call on the penalty/fumble without checking with our coaches said "do you want the ball over here or do you want it over there?" as opposed to asking if he wanted the ball or the penalty.