FIBA, Federation Issue Altering Games

I have watched a number of games this year at all levels and have come to the conclusion that FIBA rules in the OBA are messing up High School basketball.

Not so much the players but mainly the scorekeepers! I witnessed a game a few weeks back that was decided by the scorekeepers. They stopped the clock after a made basket ( this was a highschool game, with the basket coming with 5 seconds remaining), the refs went to the table and clarified the rule for them but that doesn't change the fact that the clock was stopped. It benefitted one team because they were able to run there inbound play witch led to a game winning three. They had no timeouts left to stop the clock.

In the same game parents from a team were verbally abusive to a ref because they thought that you were only aloud 3 timeouts in the second half. We all know that in high school you have 5 timeouts and can burn them all within the first 2 minutes if you wish.

Our volunteer scorekeepers are so confused, that it leads to these crucial mistakes.
How many of you Coaches, Players, Parents, Refs or basketball fans have witnessed or experienced something along these lines?

I have seen a number of poor scorekeeping incidents, but never one that has personally cost us the game. I can even remember playing a game where the scoring table was listening to an iPod during the game, even with the coach from the home school at the table supervising them!

With that being said, most problems can be avoided if you're proactive. Personally, I think athletic associations should implement a rule where all semi-final and final playoff games have three officials, with one being stationed at the scoring table. I think our athletic association had a rule like that once upon a time, but I may be wrong. Do any other athletic associations do something like that?

I found your example quite humourous because it was almost identical to what I saw happen one time, but fortunately the outcome of the game wasn't affected. We were up by three with 8 seconds left. I had my players over-protect the three-point line and allow dribble penetration for a lay-up if less than 5 seconds left on the clock. That way, following a basket, we'd be up by one, there would be less than 5 seconds left, and we could just refuse to pass the ball in and eat up the remaining time. Unfortunately the clock was stopped. The ref came over to the table, I explained our approach, and the ref ended the game. I'm not sure if this was 'officiating by the rule book', but bad timing MAY have cost us the game in that situation!

I do disagree with you on one thing - I personally think the poor scorekeeping (particularly timing as you pointed out) seen on occassion is due to the difference between high school and NBA rules, not high school and the FIBA rules. With that being said, I think proper score table training can fix that. I think more onus should be placed on home schools to properly train the scoring table, and there should be something done if the table is not trained properly. One way to avoid this, is for coaches to always have the following document handy:

http://www.nfhs.org/core/contentmanager/uploads/basketballscorerstimers.pdf

It's updated every year and addresses a lot of the misconceptions that our volunteer scorekeepers have.

With all that being said, most of the time, the scoring table is bang on and do an excellent job!

Here's to all the volunteer scorekeepers that help make high school basketball possible!