with the others having to be either delisted or elevated to the primary list at the time of the National Draft. Only half of the salary paid by a club to players on the rookie list counts towards the league's salary cap. Generally speaking, a rookie-listed player cannot be selected to play in the senior AFL competition, and must play in state-level affiliated teams, except in two circumstances: At the start of a season, a club can nominate up to two veterans from its senior list for salary cap reasons; if a team does not have a full quota of veterans, it can make up the balance by nominating rookies to be eligible for senior selection. These players are known as nominated rookies. If a senior-listed player is moved onto the long-term injury list, a rookie-listed player can be temporarily elevated in his place, becoming eligible for senior selection, while the senior player remains injured. There are usually plenty of opportunities to enact one of these rules, so rookie-listed players who are playing well enough for senior selection are seldom deprived of the opportunity by list management constraints. History The rookie list was established in 1997. It was initially aimed at providing recruitment opportunities for young players, in part filling a gap which had been left by the reduction in size of AFL lists from 52 to 42 players in 1994. At that time, rookie players must have been between the ages of 18 and 23 to qualify. In 2006, this was relaxed to allow each club to recruit a rookie older than 23 if he had never previously been on an AFL list. This has since been relaxed further, and now there no upper age or experience restrictions on Category A rookies. In 2006, "International rookies" were identified for the first time as a separate class of rookie, covering international players from any countries except Ireland, in order to protect the AFL's relationship with the Gaelic Athletic Association. The "International rookie" category has since been expanded to the broader Category B. The relaxing of eligibility criteria have resulted a notable semantic anomaly with the rookie list: that highly experienced players may serve on a club's rookie list, even though the word "rookie" is widely understood in most sports and professions to refer to a new or inexperienced person. For example, 's Heath Scotland spent his sixteenth and final AFL