State high schools prep for shot clock
Ten, nine, eight …
It’s a familiar sound inside basketball gyms, benches and fans counting aloud in unison as the clock ticks down.
… seven, six, five …
A quick look up at the scoreboard, however, reveals something unfamiliar. There aren’t seconds left in the game. Rather, it’s the middle of the third quarter and a normal possession amidst a regular-season game.
… four, three, two, one … The team scrambles into its set, doing its best to shoot before the horn sounds. Sometimes it goes. Often it doesn’t, rushed as a result of the red numbers decreasing second-by-second above the basket.
State basketball playoffs, which get underway today, mark the beginning of the end of the first full season of the shot clock in Arkansas. Although the 35-second timer has only been used in Class 6A this year, it will be implemented across all classifications in a mere 19 months at the start of the 2022-23 campaign.
While there have been occasional malfunctions and frustrations in Year 1 of the shot clock, the sentiment of
coaches statewide regarding the clock remains overwhelmingly positive less than a year after Arkansas Activities Association members approved it by a nearly 3-to-1 margin.
“It puts [Arkansas] on a level that makes basketball entertaining,” Bentonville West boys Coach Greg White said. “At the end of the day, every district is trying to get that family to fork over money on a Tuesday or Friday night. … It’s making coaches better coaches. It hasn’t changed the pace of play [and] I just think it makes our game better.”
SOUTH DAKOTA DOES IT
There were plenty of reasons why the introduction of a 35-second shot clock ultimately became a phased process in Arkansas. And perhaps the biggest impediment of them all came from outside the state.
Although each state in the country is responsible for governing its own high school athletics, the rulebook is set by the National Federation of State High School Associations, which in May voted down a proposal to mandate a shot clock for high school basketball.
At the time, only eight states — New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, California, Maryland, North Dakota South Dakota and Washington — had implemented a shot clock into their own rulebooks via an NFHS waiver.
In June, Georgia joined the group with a phased rollout of a 30-second shot clock.
White, among other coaches, worked in conjunction with AAA Deputy Executive Director Joey Walters to gather data over the course of the 2018-19 season when the shot clock was utilized in several nonconference tournaments.
Those statistics, which included the number of violations as well as game scores and turnovers, were then compiled by the AAA and filed to the NFHS as part of the state’s waiver process in order to have clearance to use a shot clock in all regular-season and postseason games.
“The argument for us always was, if South Dakota can do it, why can’t we?” White said.
Before this year, arguably nobody in the state had more experience with the shot clock than Conway. When the Wampus Cats built their arena in 2007, they installed shot clocks in both of their gyms with the expectation that its addition would come sooner rather than later.
That didn’t happen until two years ago when schools were first allowed to experiment with a shot clock. And since Conway had both the infrastructure and the event — it’s hosted an annual holiday tournament for several years — it took advantage of the opportunity to see what the future could look like.
“It just makes for a better game in general,” Lady Wampus Cats Coach Ashley Hutchcraft said. “Schematically, you can just play the game and not stall, not have to foul.”
In terms of overall game flow, coaches agree that the shot clock hasn’t changed much about the way teams play offense.
Perhaps it’s a consequence of a common pace across Arkansas. Many teams draw inspiration from regional counterparts on the college level and the Southeastern Conference features five of the nation’s top 21 men’s teams in terms of adjusted tempo per KenPom.com.
That includes the University of Arkansas men, which average just 16 seconds per possession.
If anything, the shot clock has impacted the way that high school teams defend. Elite teams like Fort Smith Northside’s girls’ squad now only have to lock in for 35 seconds at a time rather than worrying about holding a team down for a minute or even more.
“It makes the opponent speed up,” said Smith, whose Lady Bears enter the Class 6A State Tournament as the Central’s No. 1 seed. “I do think that some of the teams that wouldn’t have taken a shot in the first 35 seconds were forced to take it. And really, you’re taking it within 25 to 30 seconds.”
The positive feelings are shared by coaches who have only used the shot clock sparingly.
Morrilton’s boys’ team, which will compete in the Class 4A tournament this week, got a taste of the ticking red numbers in its very first game of the year.
But it didn’t change the way Coach Keith Zachary prepared his group. In fact, the Devil Dogs didn’t know they’d be dealing with the shot clock until they arrived at Rogers Heritage.
Morrilton wound up winning 53-48, yet the experience of the shot clock was what pleased Zachary most.
“So many kids aren’t going to play college basketball,” Zachary said. “For them to get to experience [a shot clock] in high school was great. You talk about late-clock scenarios but usually in high school, it’s at the end of the game. Well, now you’re dealing with them the whole game.”
NUMBER OF ISSUES
That kind of shift in the high school game was one of the biggest fears of coaches, said Walters, who serves as the AAA’s basketball rules interpreter.
“Some of the initial pushback was just [that] the traditional way of playing high school basketball is without a shot clock,” he said. “It’s not college, it’s not professional, and it needs to stay that way for training and teaching purposes.”
The other big reason why some initially hesitated was the cost. Coaches say their schools have spent anywhere between $3,000 and $7,000 to install shot clocks, depending on the brand and whether they need to purchase additional clocks for practice facilities.
That doesn’t include the per-game cost of an operator — instead of needing a minimum of two people, one to keep the scorebook and another to run the scoreboard, schools need a third whose sole job it is to operate the shot clock.
It’s another expenditure, albeit small, that athletic departments will have to account for in their operating budgets.
“[Some small schools say], ‘How are we going to train someone to keep the clock?… And the officials, are they going to start charging more to referee games?’” Izard County boys Coach Kyle McCandlis said. “They’re struggling financially, and especially from a small-school standpoint, I know we’re very fortunate.”
At the moment, the AAA does not plan to assist schools financially in the implementation process, but Walters believes that the phased rollout, which only required the 16 Class 6A schools to start this year, gives everyone enough time to budget accordingly.
Although Bentonville West didn’t have to worry about the cost of adding shot clocks, White has already thought about ways for schools to generate needed additional revenue.
“If an athletic director went in and said they were going to raise ticket prices from $5 to $6 … nobody would have a problem with it, especially if it’s a one-year thing,” White said. “[Or] if it’s your rotation to buy jerseys, a set of jerseys is usually around $5,000. So if you take a year off from buying jerseys and buy a shot clock, you haven’t lost any money.”
While those certainly are legitimate concerns, it’s clear that a heavy majority of coaches are overwhelmingly optimistic about the future of the game as the more and more teams get exposure to the shot clock over the coming year before it eventually goes statewide.
“It’s going to change the game for the better,” Little Rock Christian girls Coach Ronald Rogers said. “Once everybody gets used to it, it’s going to make the game so much more exciting. It’s going to make teams play, it’s going to make coaches coach and that’s the best part for me.”