Had an interesting Friday with clock management. Was wondering if anybody had any opinions.
First off the gentleman came to the referee of my crew and explained he had several years of expierence running both the game clock as well as the 25 second play clock. This guy was horrible he would start the 25 second clock well after the ready for play whistle and a few times never even started it at all. It always seemed to start later when the home team had the ball. The most interesting thing of the night is when the play clock was down to about 12 seconds it was then restarted for no apparent reason. I believe this is in violation so we communicated with the clock person and never really got an answeras to why he did this. So we restarted the clock and told the team they could not break the huddle until the play clock reached 12 seconds so they did and it then resulted in a delay of game penalty.

My question is at what point do you start keeping the 25 second clock on the field. Under NFHS rules as long as the clock is working you have to use it. Do you penalize the home team fo this? We were unsure what to do.
Any opinions would help.

Keep the clock on the field after the second time you had to correct it. Figure that the first may have been an honest mistake but this ain't baseball. Two strikes and you're out.

I too would dump the 25 second clock if the operator couldn't run it correctly. I might give 3 chances, but wouldn't fault a whitehat who dumped it after 2. If you let this go long enough that you had time to notice trends ("it seemed to happen more often for the home team"), you let it go WAY WAY WAY too long.

I think you went too far in making them stay in the huddle until 12 seconds were left. Was the game clock running when the play clock was initially reset when it reached 12? If it was then you should have just reset both clocks and tried again. I really don't think you would have a rule to back you when you kept them in the huddle.

I'm pretty sure that around here (upstate NY), a 25-second clock controlled from the booth counts as "auxiliary game management equipment," which requires a specific exemption from the state association to be used.

Of course, around here, the clock operators for varsity games are paid officials from our organization, avoiding the bias problem (but, unfortunately, not always avoiding the incompetence problem). At lower levels, the clock is kept by one of the on-field officials.

you would treat this just as if the clock was malfunctioning. move it to the field. no one in the stands has to know that it was the operator that was malfuctioning. it will also make the situation with the operator easier. you can simply tell him that the clock does not seem to be functioning correctly that you will be keeping the 25 second clock on the field.