Last night, our Board for our local rec league had it's monthly meeting. Our rules committee recommended we change the timeout rule and go back to the old rule that only players on the floor may request timeouts. This recommendation came out of strong comments made by our refs at the conclusion of last season.

Many of our officials are extremely inexperienced. In fact, 90% of them have 2 years or less. Although we have covered only grades 3-8 (we are finally adding HS this year, since we got the gym space), it is still difficult to expect inexperienced officials to administer the current rule properly. We all know the problems inherent in the current rule and have discussed it many times on this board.

I think this modification will result in less contact being missed during games since the attention of the officials will not be diverted from the court and that we will have vastly fewer instances of improper timeouts being called.

I would be curious to know if there are any other rec leagues out there who have made similar decisions on modifying (especially recent) NF rules. Thanks guys.

I dunno.
 

Mark,
I'm sure it'll work out just fine for you folks, because you pay attention to the training and improvement of your young/new officials.
Yet with the current rule, the players are still allowed to request time-out... as well as the coaches.
From a couple/few years ago, before we could recognize a request from a coach, I remember my frustration at not being able to call a time-out that I saw the coach begging from a player.
I think the current rule works better for me and that the old rule was improved upon.
Besides being easier, if it were me, I would challenge the young officials to get it right.
mick

I think I agree with Mick, 90% of the time it's no big
deal. If you're resonably experienced (that is, you're
awake) then 99% of the time it's no big deal. That 1%
usually causes more cr*ap than might be expected but I
would encourage the new guys to keep their eyes/ears open
and anticipate the time out request. On the other hand
(good thing I only have 2) I can understand why you
decided to do this.

Actually, our rec leagues went the other way several years ago. It's sort of difficult to tell a coach who's coaching 7 year olds that he can't request time out. We also do it in football, where the coach is allowed to request under NF rules.

IMHO
 

From my perspective (which is upside down:)) I much prefer the FIBA rule which only allows a time out to be called when there is a break in play. Therefore we don't have to worry about players on the floor (or falling out of bounds) calling timeouts.

As a player (and a coach) I would rather use your rules, but as a ref...the decision is easy!

We were happy when the NF formalized our rule allowing coaches to call timeouts. Coaches are instructed to make themselves known if they want to call one. They are to stand, even take a step on the court if no player is around, and use the football T signal while calling time.

It was just to hard for the coach to get the attention of the little kids, 7 years through 9 or 10 years, so we decided to allow the coaches to call them also.

As for other changes:
We allow 4 full time outs per game. Full = 1 minute. No shorter time outs are provided.

6 seconds in the lane for the 7&8 year olds.

There is no count for closely guarded if the ball is moving. We do have JV and Varsity high school levels and we hold to no counting even with them.

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BTW, some time back you asked about clocks. Have you thought about putting wall clocks in the gyms? We have 3 such clocks either already in the gyms or waiting for installation this season. We replaced an old one last year. It is good PR with the schools as we let the PE departments use our clocks.