A real shot clock violation

Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2007

On Sports

John Wehmueller

They sit there on the gym wall, unused during the boys game; then magically come to life for the girls. This is nothing new — it’s been going on in gyms across the state for years. But I finally got fed up enough to try and find out why.

‘‘I don’t know why,” Paint Branch girls basketball guru Heather Podosek told me. ‘‘I think it’s absolutely ridiculous that the boys don’t play with a shot clock. They play with it in college; they play with it in the pros; they play with it in semi-pros. I don’t know why they don’t.”

Surely, thinks I, there has to be an answer. So I called our friends at the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association to get it.

‘‘I will try to answer your question,” said Bill Burroughs, coordinator of officials for MPSSAA. ‘‘My answer is going to be, probably, speculation.”

Fantastic.

If Burroughs doesn’t know, nobody does. He said people ask him about the shot clock ‘‘a million times a year.” And he does have an explanation of how it came to be that the state uses the shot clock for girls and not for boys. Not an answer, mind, but an explanation.

Here’s the short version — MPSSAA used to use two sets of rules, one for girls and one for boys. That’s not without precedent — the NCAA didn’t used to write the rules for women’s college basketball, which is why women got a shot clock in 1970 and men didn’t until 1986.

Eventually, MPSSAA decided the National Federation of State High School Associations would govern its rules in all sports. The NFHS has the same rulebook for girls basketball as for boys; it does not permit a shot clock.

In true MPSSAA fashion, they didn’t want to ruffle the feathers of girls coaches who were used to the shot clock. So they made an exception and stuck with it for girls, figuring NFHS would eventually go to a shot clock for both genders.

Burroughs says this was about 15, 20 years ago.

Here it is 2007, and Maryland is still sitting on the fence. Too scared of the backlash from some girls coaches to get rid of the clocks in compliance with NFHS rules; too unwilling to break them further by turning the clocks on for boys.

Mind you, breaking the rules further would have absolutely, positively, no effect — none, nada, zip, zilch — on the state’s relationship with NFHS.

‘‘Because we’re a federation and not an association, our rules are basically somewhat voluntary,” NFHS Assistant Director Mary Struckhoff said. ‘‘For instance, Texas follows NCAA football rules instead of ours. It’s the state’s prerogative.

‘‘If they don’t follow our rules, the only consequence is that they’re not part of the rules-making process.”

So if Maryland chose to institute a shot clock for boys, NFHS would boot the state off its basketball rules committee — a committee, mind you, on which Maryland has never been allowed to sit, because it uses a shot clock for girls.

Not much of a deterrent.

In fact, there are six other states that employ a shot clock for public-school games — California, Massachusetts, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island and Washington. All are members of the National Federation (every state is, plus D.C.).

What’s really bizarre, and I mean really, is that there’s another place where they use a shot clock for girls, but not for boys. That’s right, ladies and gents — there’s someone out there as weird as Maryland.

Appropriately, the name of this waffle-loving land is Washington; but this time, we’re talking about the state.

‘‘There have been a number of attempts to either add the shot clock for boys or eliminate it for girls, so everyone’s playing under the same rules,” said Cindy Hettinger, assistant executive director of the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association. ‘‘Those proposals have always failed. There are girls coaches who absolutely want to keep the shot clock. Some boys coaches want it, but the majority do not.”

Turns out the situation in Washington is the same as here — the shot clock rule for girls dates back to when the National Association for Girls and Women in Sports wrote the only rulebook for women’s basketball. Neither Maryland nor Washington has been able to get rid of it since.

Here’s why that’s not a good enough reason.

One: the refs. Burroughs himself is a referee who does both boys and girls games. So it’s not impossible to learn an extra set of rules. But wouldn’t it be easier for refs if they could officiate both ends of a boy-girl doubleheader, and not have to switch rulebooks in between?

Two: the clocks. One of the biggest reasons many states are reluctant to go to a shot clock is the cost of installing and maintaining the clocks themselves. On top of that, there needs to be an extra person at the scorers’ table to run the thing.

Here, obviously, that’s not a problem. The clocks are already in the gyms. The people who can run them are already there, too. The boys could use a clock for no extra cost in money or manpower. Or the clocks could come down and go in cold storage until NFHS (inevitably, in my opinion) puts them in its rulebook.

Three: it looks stupid. What are we saying here, people? That girls would just dribble around for eight minutes if they weren’t forced to shoot? Of course that’s not really the reason, but think about what it looks like to an outsider.

All of these factors, though, are overwhelmed by the state’s complete paralysis in the face of any dissenting opinion.

‘‘I tell you right now, it’s an extremely controversial subject,” Burroughs said. ‘‘I could name names of people I have a tremendous amount of respect for who think there should be one, and others who think it would be the worst thing ever to happen to high-school basketball. I don’t talk shot clock with some of my basketball colleagues. It’s like religion or politics.”

Come on.

I have sympathy for Burroughs, who didn’t create this situation. But it’s high time the state bit the bullet, and made one set of coaches — boys or girls, it doesn’t matter which — do the same. As it stands now, the inmates are running the asylum, and the tail is wagging the dog.

Which is, at last, the real answer to the question. Girls have a shot clock, and boys do not, because MPSSAA doesn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.

Except for all those people offended by the absurd status quo.