Held Ball Signal

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by bucky

I never really understood the stop clock signal ... The whistle is enough.

Granted, it does seem a little bit redundant. Back when I was coaching middle school basketball, we didn't have adults for timekeepers, and scorekeepers. We used students, and it was my job to teach them. The easiest thing to teach? "Stop the clock every time you hear a whistle". Nothing about open hand, closed fist, etc. just, "Stop the clock every time you hear a whistle". Of course, teaching when to start the clock was a little more complicated, but for stopping the clock, "Stop the clock every time you hear a whistle", worked well enough for middle school games.

Going back to the ancient days of NFHS (or whatever) mechanics, there must have been a pretty good reason for the three different stop the clock signals (fouls, violations, held (jump balls back then) balls). I wonder what that reason was? Maybe, the more information communicated to everybody the better? Or, maybe it was considered to be some type of preliminary signal, like we all do for fouls (of course for fouls it would be a preliminary signal to the second preliminary signal)?