[Sharpshooternes]

Originally Posted by BillyMac

Does anyone use an intra-crew unofficial signal to let your partner know that there's only a short time left in the period (one minute) so as to not be surprised by, and possibly miss, a close call (shot released) at the end of the period.

Over the past thirty-two years, we've had a lot of unofficial signals for this, head patting (like the clock violation signal), point to your wrist (I guess that it would be point to your cell phone now), single finger (for one minute), point to clock and turn finger clockwise (mimicking a clock), etc.

For most of my thirty-two years, many of us were reluctant to use any such signal at all, because we had an assistant interpreter, he was a by the book guy (no signal for this in the book), who also ran our training committee, who discouraged us from using any such signal. When questioned about why he discouraged such signals, he always responded that both of us should know how much time is left.

He retired a few years ago and now we're left hanging in the wind.

Although you both should know how much time is on the clock, it is good for the crew to know that the rest of the crew knows. End of game good shot/late shot situations are often thought of as the most important play of the game if it is a one posession ball game. Getting this call is crucial and your crew will sink or swim depending on if you got it right or not. It looks awfully bad when the covering official loses track of time and isn't even remotely thinking about if the shot is off in time. The communication between the crew I think is appropriate here. We use a one finger point to our Ps to verify they check the clock and know the time remaining. Some use the head pat thing but I will agree this can be confused with shot clock violation signiling so I don't like it.