A rookie is a person in the first year of activity in a sport, or someone new to a profession, training, or activity such as a rookie police officer, rookie pilot, or a recruit.
Throughout sports
In some sports there are traditions in which rookies must do things, or tricks are played on them. Examples in baseball include players having to dress up in very strange costumes, or getting hit in the face with a cream pie; a traditional rookie's "hazing" procedure in American football involves taping players to a goalpost and dousing them with ice water, Gatorade, and other substances. In Major League Baseball, the MLB has cracked down on hazing by enacting an Anti-Hazing and Anti-Bullying Policy which prohibits players from dressing up as the opposite sex, or wearing offensive costumes based on race, sex, nationality, age, sexual orientation, and gender identify.
NASCAR and INDYCAR rookies are denoted by a yellow stripe on sections of the car as prescribed in the respective rule books. In NASCAR, the rookie stripe is located on the tail panel of the race car.
NASCAR
The following rules are for rookie status in a national series:
Must have run no more than five, seven, and have been declared to race for driver points in that series, races in any previous season.
*In the Camping World Truck Series, a driver that is 17 at the start of the season and does not make ten starts overall is eligible in his first full season after turning 18. Truck Series drivers who are 16 and 17 may only participate in nine races during the season based on circuits.
Drivers who compete in more than five races in a higher NASCAR-sanctioned series are not eligible for the award in a lower series if they have not declared for the higher series.
If a driver does not start eight races before the end of Race 20 on the schedule, they will immediately become ineligible to earn rookie points for the rest of that season and starting in 2011, remained declared for that series. Drivers may change series declaration in order to avoid this.
A driver may not receive rookie points if they start a race for a team that they did not qualify with. However, they are still eligible for championship points in that race.
INDYCAR
The following rules are for rookie status in the NTT IndyCar Series:
Must not have participated in more than three NTT IndyCar Series races in a season.
A veteran driver in the Indianapolis 500 may still be a Series Rookie if he has not competed in more than three series races overall.
A driver who has never raced in the Indianapolis 500 but has made a legal season of NTT IndyCar Series races is still an Indianapolis 500 rookie in his first start.
In the National Basketball Association, a rookie is any player who has never played a game in the NBA until that year and the past 5 years. The NBA awards the best rookie with the NBA Rookie of the Year Award, as voted upon by a selected panel of United States and Canadian sportswriters and broadcasters. In the NBA, rookies have special contract rules which limit how much a team can pay them as well as limiting the length of the contract.
Ice hockey
To qualify as a rookie in the National Hockey League, a player must not have played 25 regular season games or more in any single season. As of the 1990-91 NHL season, a player also must be 26 years old or younger to qualify as a rookie. The National Hockey League awards the best rookie with the Calder Memorial Trophy, as voted upon by the Professional Hockey Writers' Association. In the NHL, rookies have special contract rules which limit how much a team can pay them as well as limiting the length of the contract. An NHL rookie contract is called an Entry Level contract and is typically limited to three years.
The Oxford English Dictionary states that the origins are uncertain, but that perhaps it is a corruption of the wordRecruit. The earliest example in the OED is from Rudyard Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads : "So 'ark an' 'eed, you rookies, which is always grumblin' sore", referring to rookies in the sense of raw recruits to the British Army. At least during the beginning of the 20th century, in the British Army the term "rookie" was typically used in place of "recruit" as exemplified in Trenching at Gallipoli by John Gallishaw and in The Amateur Army by Patrick MacGill. Perhaps the expression is derived from "rook", whereby a "rookie" would be someone who is cheated or defrauded.
