What time is it?

[Mark Padgett]

Last night, the assignor for the huge kids "competitive" league (that means the league, not the kids, is the huge thing) around here scheduled me to work a 5th grade boys game with him. He thought we would have a lot of fun doing it. The game was at a MS with three gym floors. Two of them have scoreboards on their walls but one - the smallest of the three - uses a tabletop portable. Since we had the "smallest" kids last night, we got that gym. Unfortunately, this scoreboard is in disrepair and the timing lights on the front don't work, so it doesn't show the time on the board, only on a small LED on the back so the timer can see it. Since it's owned by the school district, it probably won't ever get fixed due to monetary considerations, since the school doesn't use it for anything of theirs.

The timer would call out the minutes for us and then called off each 10 seconds under one minute, then called out the final 10 seconds each period. At least the horn worked. Whenever there was a timeout, or whenever we asked (usually at a dead ball), he would give us the exact time remaining in the quarter.

It was kind of weird, but I noticed the time seemed to go faster than normal, perhaps because I never glanced at the clock to look at the time. I'm sure it was just a perception thingie.

Anyone else ever have anything like this in a game?

Oh yeah, the visitors won by 35. I knew that because the board at least showed the score and the period.

[chartrusepengui]

We have a HS gym where they play the MS tournaments and league games on 3 courts. Tournys use 18 min running clocks. Court 3 can start after both other courts and will be done about a minute sooner. For some reason it runs fast and they can't seem to calibrate the thing.

When doing a lot of games in a tournment - we fight like the dickens for that court!!

[26 Year Gap]

Had one game that I was coaching back a few years ago, just before the gap ended, that had a nice new scoreboard that didn't work properly. So we hauled out the old one. And I mean old. It had the minute and second hand and had a weird sounding horn. Like the one in Hoosiers. Shoulda made my team wear vintage shorts and Chuck Taylors.