Should high school hoops clock in?

Do Maryland and West Virginia need to adopt a shot clock in high school boys’ basketball?
That was the question on the lips of many fans at Keyser High School Friday night after watching the Petersburg Vikings hold the ball for the final four-odd minutes of the second quarter of the Region II, Section I final.
Let me be clear: I’m not criticizing the Vikings for employing such tactics against the Golden Tornado. Far from it.
KHS won the teams’ two regular season meetings by 33 and 38 points. Odds are Petersburg wasn’t going to come into Tornado Alley and win a 75-74 shootout.
Their chances were much better if the game was in the 50s, the 40’s, or even the 30s.
And since Keyser is a team that absolutely loves (and excels) at a high tempo, why not take the game off the boil for a while?
It reminded me of the soccer episode of “The Simpsons” (Ties! You bet!) where the fans are going nuts while the players just pass the ball back and forth between the wings and the middle. Never has so little basketball action caused so much noise at Tornado Alley.
So there was Viking point guard Brandon Kivett...holding, holding, holding, even though his team was down two points at the time, while the crowd goes berserk.
The Keyser student section even left their seats en masse to try and collectively go stand by Kivett and heckle him (they were wisely kept from doing so).
The Vikings went away from this tactic in the second half (why, I don’t know), and KHS used a 17-2 run to break the game open and win by 11 points.
Still, the game was much closer than the past two meetings. Throw that run out, and Petersburg actually wins by four.
Also, with the change in the WVSSAC playoff format, Petersburg wasn’t
see CLOCK page 5
playing for their season on Friday.
So why risk injury by playing a full-tempo, heart-on-your-sleeve, physical game in the sectional final when, win or lose Friday, the regional game this Wednesday is the one that matters, the one that punches the basketball Golden Ticket to Charleston and the state tournament?
On the Maryland side of the Potomac, Mountain Ridge used a time-milking four corners offense successfully in their first round playoff win over Fort Hill.
With the best free-throw shooting team in the area, and the best foul shooter from the foul line, three-point line, Timbuktu, etc., in David Hobel, the Miners’ formula was simple: get a decent lead and literally hold on to the ball, forcing the other team to foul to get the ball back.
Leading by 13 points with just under two minutes left in the first half, the Miners held the ball for almost the entire time before Jordan Helmick got a steal and a quick two the other way for Fort Hill.
And with a nine point lead heading to the fourth quarter, the game plan really bore fruit. Ten made free throws and solid defense against a frustrated Sentinel team eventually doubled that lead, and the Miners won by 18 points.
Proponents of a shot clock argue that it would make games more entertaining, and that idea may have some merit.
But I think the number of bad shots, hurried by a 35-second limit, would increase significantly.
Also, teams generally play straight-up games in the regular season, only resorting to such stalling tactics late in the fourth quarter of games, or, in the cases of Petersburg and Mountain Ridge, in playoff or elimination scenarios.
There’s also the added issues of spending the money to get shot clocks for each gym in the state, an unnecessary expense in these economic conditions, and having someone in-house to run the shot clock. It’s hard enough getting good, committed people to run the game clock, especially at small high schools.
Maryland, of course, does have a clock for girls’ basketball, so their learning curve would be less steep.
Unless holding the ball and other time-wasting tactics become the norm rather than the exception, I don’t expect to see either Maryland or West Virginia join the eight states nationwide that have a shot clock for boys’ hoops.