All opinions will be taken into account in the NFHS basketball rules committee meeting.
CLEVELAND, Ohio –- Basketball coaches have their opinions. So do the fans – and the officials, the parents, the athletes, the athletic directors, the executive directors and the national federation.
On Monday, all those opinions will be taken into account when the National Federation of State High School Association’s basketball rules committee meets in Indianapolis to vote on the proposals, approximately 32 in all, which could change the high school game.
For the first time in so long that even the Ohio High School Athletic Association can’t remember, one of those basketball rules committee members will be from the Buckeye State. OHSAA Commissioner Dan Ross was elected this year to the committee as the head of Section 2, a section that encompasses Ohio, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.
Ohio has the largest amount of high schools (third in the nation) and the largest amount of students (fourth in the nation) of all those states, so what the state’s more than 1,600 high school basketball coaches say receives major consideration.
That’s why for the last week, we’ve broken down every aspect of two of the proposals the Northeast Ohio Media Group knows are on the table: shot clocks and 18-minute halves.
Every year, the OHSAA sends out a survey to its voting members to find whether they are in favor or against the proposal. NEOMG sent out a similar survey to local coaches to find whether they are in favor or against the addition of a shot clock and the switch from eight-minute quarters to 18-minute halves. Of 79 coaches who responded, 54 were in favor of shot clocks and 50 were in favor of 18-minute halves.
That’s because at the base of every proposal lies a vote.
An approval or veto.
A yes. Or a no.
‘This is America’s Game’
In 1891 Dr. James Naismith created an American game in which the object is to get the ball through the hoop.
Fast forward 123 years and spend one March around a college basketball fan. The game has caught fire and grew into not just the nation’s game, but the world’s.
While baseball is seen as America’s pastime, basketball is America’s futuretime. Yet the rest of the world is catching on.
One of the best shooting guards in the Big Ten and best forwards in the Big 12 were from Canada. One of the best centers in the college game is from Cameroon. A forward playing in Pittsburgh has a hometown in Nigeria.
Niels Giffey of Berlin, Germany just won a national title with Connecticut earlier this month.
Scour any high school roster in the areas of Florida, Kansas or Maryland and see how many foreigners are on the roster. Most are playing high school ball in America now.
One of the best basketball players to ever play the game, though, came from Akron. LeBron James will forever be synonymous with St. Vincent-St. Mary, his high school where he won three state titles before making the jump straight to the NBA in 2003.
Dru Joyce, St. Vincent-St. Mary’s boys basketball coach and LeBron’s high school coach, is one of the local coaches in favor of adding a shot clock to the game.
“I think that we’re falling behind the world,” Joyce said. “It’s our game, but the world is playing the game and they’re playing it at a level that’s, honestly, better suited for the kids as they transition into the college age and the professional range.
“The world is playing with a shot clock from the time they start playing club ball in other countries, especially in Europe. We need to honestly kind of get our heads out of the stand and realize that the world is catching up.
Joyce understands there is a cost that comes to the addition of a shot clock.
“It is so prohibitive that it would preclude high schools from adding it? I just don’t believe that that is the case,” Joyce said. “The cost factor shouldn’t be the determining issue.”
‘It’s all about keeping the balance’
Many of these rules that the committees put into place are to keep a competitive balance.
Some coaches that NEOMG spoke with argued that a shot clock would force a player to take a bad shot. Others though, like Paul Barlow, Hathaway Browns’ five-time state champion coach, would like how it rewards strong defense.
Then there’s Dan Barringer. He was involved in basketball for the last 46 years and retired this year from the Cleveland school system.
He’s a former president of the International Association of Approved Basketball Officials (IAABO), the largest basketball officials’ organization in the world.
He is against shot clocks and 18-minute halves for many reasons.
Last week the IAABO held its spring seminar in which a survey was released of how often shots were taken. Thousands of games were analyzed across seven state. The results showed boys took a shot within 22 seconds and girls within 25 seconds.
“That tells me you don’t need a shot clock,” Barringer said
NEOMG was able to get the cost of a new shot clock broken down by Daktronics, one of several suppliers of shot clocks. A new shot clock can cost between $5,000 and $7,000. Then there are several other variables like a shot clock operator (average cost $600 per season), wiring, installation and even a new scoreboard (average cost between $10,000 to $25,000-plus) if the current one isn’t shot-clock compatible.
“A lot of athletic departments are watching their money right now,” Barringer said.
That’s the administrative argument, which other current athletic directors like Cardinal athletic director Andy Cardinal agreed with.
After talking about shot clocks and the strategy of stalling, Cardinal finally said: “I’m really not opposed to shot clocks, it’s more the cost involved with it. ….We have more pressing needs than $5,000 for shot clocks.”
From an officiating standpoint, Barringer said the addition of a shot clock is simple, except for when it “comes to the shot clock operator doing the job right.”
Besides that, if a shot clock violation occurs, a horn goes off and the opposing team gets the ball.
From a coaching point of view, Barringer said he refers to the survey of how often a shot is taken and also that “I coached my kids to take a shot when the good shot was there.”
Barringer is also against 18-minute halves. Some coaches have said 18-minute halves, which would extend the current game by four minutes from 32 to 36 minutes, would put student athletes home even later than they already should be. Other coaches, like Barlow, have said to make it nine-minute quarters. There are still many who say they want the 18-minute quarters because it makes the high school game more like the college game.
As for Barringer, he said he believes the extra four minutes would have coaches and asking for a raise for the extra time.
“And rightfully so,” he said. “It’s an overall cost thing across the board.”
‘If we’re supposed to be a training ground for college, then we’re doing a terrible job’
There are eight outliers in the world of no shot clocks.
California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota and Washington high school basketball games play using a shot clock.
Of those eight, only California and New York have more high school students than Ohio and only California has more high schools than the Buckeye State.
These shot clocks have been in place for most of these states for more than a decade or two. Washington was the last to institute a shot clock for boys in 2010 (the girls instituted one in 1974).
Like Washington was until four years ago, Maryland’s shot clock is only used by the girls, who adopted the shot clock before the NFHS rule.
It hasn’t been instituted in the boys game because “they don’t want it” according to Ned Sparks, the executive director of the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association. The MPSAA oversees 198 schools.
“The boys have felt like at the high school level, it takes some of the coaching and decisions out of the game,” Sparks said. “It’s kind of a yearly decision and one of these days, it will probably happen.”
If the boys were to institute it, everything is set up, yet an MPSSAA girls game at the inception of a shot clock looked like the Brooklyn-Toronto game the other night where the shot clock operator had to hold a shot clock and a horn.
“From my recollection, it was very rarely that you had a visible shot clock,” Sparks said of the way the MPSSAA accomplished instituting shot clocks with the cost. “It was actually kept at the scorer’s table and eventually over time everyone got them and now everyone has them.”
The amount a shot clock violation occurs, though, hasn’t changed.
“If it goes off once every two games, that’s about normal,” Sparks said.
Matt Fetsch, the NDHSAA’s assistant director, said if he proposed the change to take the shot clock or 18-minute halves away from his coaches, the nearly 130 members would unanimously oppose it.
The schools overcame the cost of shot clocks by incorporating a sponsor.
And in New York. Shot clocks have been in place for almost two decades.
Robert Zayas, the executive director of the New York State Public High School Athletic Association, said schools always have had issues with budgets, but in the last decade, everyone has really had to justify expenditures – and that is why the proposal of a shot clock passing is so difficult.
Before he was in New York, which oversees 783 high schools, he was in New Mexico, where he watched the ball held for the better part of a game.
“It ends up being two teams looking at each other,” Zayas said. “Shot clocks add a lot to speed up the game and keep the game flowing.”
That’s a move that most local coaches expressed as making the high school game more like the collegiate one. Both Zayas and Sparks disagreed with that.
“Quite frankly, we are not a training ground for college,” Sparks said. “That certainly is a byproduct of what happens from very good players but if we consider us a training ground for college, we’re doing a terrible job because very few of our kids go on to play in college.”
The NCAA, which governs collegiate athletics, actually researched the “probability of competing beyond high school.” The organization found that 3.3% of high school men’s basketball and 3.7% of women’s basketball players move on from high school to college and .03% of both men’s and women’s basketball high school players will one day become a professional.
‘Children First’
There’s a gold lapel pin that OHSAA commissioner Dan Ross wears with pride. It says two words: ‘Children First.’
It’s a statement that doesn’t go unnoticed by other high school athletic associations.
On Monday, Ross will take his opinion and many others into that meeting in Indianapolis. They will range from how often shots go off now and the international game to cost and college.
In the end, there’s an unofficial motto that the OHSAA goes by that will likely guide Ross’s vote.
It’s about preparing kids for the next level of life, not the next level of competition.
Contact high school sports reporter Stephanie Kuzydym by email (skuzydym@cleveland.com) or on Twitter (@stephkuzy). Or log in and leave a message in the comments section below.