Are timers out of a job?

[Bradley Batt]

I used this system at a camp last summer - it is pretty impressive!

Basically, you were a device similar to something you would wear for a wireless microphone - a little bigger than a pager. A small wire runs up underneath your shirt and a microphone hooks into a clip on your lanyard.

When your whistle is blown (it must be a Fox40) it "listens" for 3 distinct tones of the whistle and stops the clock immediately! To start the clock there is a little button on the side of the little pager-like device. In the games that we used it in we had one of the off officials start the clock.

Incidentally, the same guy that invented this (a former NBA referee) is working on a system that will stop the clock when a goal is scored - for use in the last minutes of NCAA and NBA games.

I would expect to see this system used more and more often at the NBA and NCAA level - it gets rid of the issue of referees having to go back over to the table to add 0.7, 0.5, 1.2 seconds, etc. back onto the clock.

Like was stated previously, you would still want a timer there for backup - and they would also have to run the shot clock.

Later,
Brad