A question
 

Hello to all,

I am a coach of an 8th grade girls team. We just concluded our league tournament this past week, which we hosted. During the tournament, a situation arose which I was wondering about. No complaints here, just a question.

Situation one--Team A is leading by 6. There are 9.7 seconds left in the game. Team B is in-bounding under A's basket. As team B is coming up the court, the clock is not running. In my estimation, 5-6 seconds go by. Team B throws up a 3-pointer which goes in, then B calls time out. The clock now reads 9.3.

The officials meet at the scorers table with the coaches. The timekeeper says that he mistakenly let 6 seconds run off the clock on an earlier possession, and that he was counting off 6 seconds in his head before starting the clock this time. As you can imagine, this did not sit well with the officials, nor the coach of team A.

The officials said that since they could not remember the exact time which was previously on the clock, and they could not say for certain how much time should be taken off, they just left the clock as it was. The coach of A did not like it, but now, with only a 3 point lead, did not want to risk getting whacked by arguing further. Team A was able to run out the clock and win the game so no damage was done.

By the way, have you guessed that I was the coach of team A?

I have never had this happen to me before so I really wasn't sure if I had a case. I enjoy reading this forum and have learned a great deal. I didn't want to say something stupid about a correctable error which really wasn't and end up as one of the coaches you guys shake your heads about...so I just sat down and shut up.

What should have happened here? Did the right thing happen? I really didn't think the officials would run extra time off the clock. However, we were trying to hold on for only our second win of the season. I probably would have said anything to convince the refs to run some extra time off for me.

Sorry for going on so long. Thanks also for all the good info on this board.

Either the timer was out & out cheating or he innocently decided to take matters into his own hands and fix some prior clock error. In either case he was dead wrong, but you have to wonder why he picked this point in the game to make things right.

There's a lot of ways that the floor officials screwed this up, but once they discovered the error the simple thing to do would have been to take 6 seconds off the clock, since this is the amount of time the timer said he waited.

At a bare minimum, if the trail official was doing his job, he would have been counting (visibly and silently?) as the ball was being brought to mid court. He could have taken AT LEAST that amount of time off the game clock as it was "specific information" he could have used to correct a timing error. Help me out here esteemed members, but isn't that the gist of the new Fed rule this year?

The timekeeper is a very good guy who thought he was doing the right thing. This game was at our place and he has done a great job for us in the past. He just had one of those moments. I'm just glad that as a coach I have never done anything stupid like that. HA! (I won't even mention the fact that I accidentally caused one of my own players to commit a lane violation right before this incident, which wiped out a potentially game-icing free-throw.)

Actually, I saw him the next night at a HS game and he said that he should have notified the officials when he originally let the 6 seconds run off. I just nodded my head and thought to myself, "Why couldn't you think of this last night when I was desparate?"

As the Referee that is what I would have done. I consider that to be definite knowledge of how much time should have come off.

The timer clearly should have notified the officials immediately after the first clock error and had that one fixed then. The timer should never take it upon himself to change the clock. I'm sure that he is a good guy and made an error in judgment. He will learn from this experience and be better next time.

He should've been counting, yes, but it's understandable that he was not because there were only 9.7 seconds left in the game. So he was probably thinking (correctly) that it's not possible to have a 10-second backcourt violation. So why count?

Well, this exact situation is why we should count the last 10 seconds or so, even if there's no rulebook reason to count.

Everybody learned, as is typical in a MS tournament. :)
I'm sure the officials have realized several ways they could have avoided/corrected that situation and will be more mindful of the clock in the future; your clock keeper certainly thought about it afterwards.
If this was the last of several games in a row, couple inexperience with the probability that everyone may have been a bit mentally fatigued, especially with the outcome apprently not in doubt [6 point lead in a girls' 8th grade game with less than 10 seconds!] and an ending that is 'less than clean' is understandable. As a coach, you handled it well, but some time certainly should have been run off the clock.

First of all, I would hope that someone on the crew would look at the clock in this situation. Secondly, I'd consider the scorekeeper's comments as definite knowledge and take the time off.

Great job of asking a question and listening to responses Coach. Some coaches that post here aren't as respectful or just want us to rip a fellow official. I personally appreciate your approach.

No, I didn't guess, and that's a good thing! I'm very, very impressed by your logic, "did not want to risk getting whacked by arguing further." Also, I like the part about "we won so no damage done."

I strongly recommend that you run clinics for all MS coaches, anf that they pay you large amounts of money.

As others have said, officials should have removed 6 seconds, since timer said that's how much he let it run. But it's understandable that they didn't know that part. The clock keeper doesn't have the right to just take timing matters like that into his own hands, and I hope he was instructed not to do it in the future. He should have told the officials as soon as he realized he'd goofed, and let them decide what to do at that point. I'm just letting you know that for future tournaments, so you can tell them at the beginning of the tournament what they need to do, and how to handle things.