[BoomerSooner]

The only time I've ever subscribed to the philosophy of not granting a requested time out was when I called intramural games in college. We used a running clock that could only be stopped with a time out, injury or at the official's discretion. Most teams were smart enough to save their timeouts for late game situations especially if they needed to foul to try to catch up. If you were out of time outs, the time lost waiting for everybody to walk to the other end of the court, line up and then actually shoot the free throws pretty much spelled doom. I recall losing 1-2 minutes per trip to the line if nobody used a time out.

During my freshman year, I estimated that many of the guys out there shot under 50% from the stripe, so by season's end I had concluded that even if the opposing team was smart enough to have their best shooter take the free throws for a technical foul (many teams thought the same guy that was fouled had to shoot), it was still a better proposition to take the time out to stop the clock (NCAA Men's, so POI resumption, but clock stayed stopped). By the time I started calling games during my sophomore year, my strategy had spread and the intramural administrator had caught on to what was causing games to run over the typical hour scheduled for each game and instituted a rule that the clock would only stop while the official was reporting any fouls and/or notifying the coach/captain of the technical foul. Once that aspect of the situation was cleared up, the clock would resume running.

I was so frustrated with that decision that I would only grant a timeout in a "bail-out" situation (trapped in the corner, 5 or 10 second count, etc). When necessary, I'd call an official's time out for equipment and have the captain tie his shoe or look for a contact while I explained that the benefit of taking the technical foul had been eradicated by the rule.