NFHS Clock question

Um, I think that in NFHS, your time is official, not the referee's time. He can ask you to correct the number, but the timekeeper keeps the official time, not the referee.

(working from memory, not the book, so someone will correct me)

 

Stadium clock is official unless mutually agreed by coaches.

 

And yet you got the appointed as the replacement anyway. Karma is strange sometimes.

 

Not at all- I (and most refs, I think) are the choir here. The clock means the addition of a whole set of rules that are unnecessary and add to our mental burden.

But they are the hs (and college) rules and if we agree to do the games, we agree to follow them.

 

Unless your state modified it, you only stop the clock when there is a sub by the winning team with less than 5 minutes in the second half. You don't need to look for subs in the last 5 minutes of the 1st half.

 

The clock is the single worst part of both NFHS/NCAA. Very unintuitive and way too much of my focus is constantly directed to that stupid clock and making sure it’s running/stopped.

 

In strict NFHS rules, the time on the clock is the official time. Referees will notice that the clock has not been stopped or started when it should have been so they are allowed to adjust the clock.

In some states, the NFHS rules have been modified so that the stadium clock is official until the last two minutes when official time is kept on the field by the referee.

 

But that's what we are stuck with until we can convince NFHS and the NCAA to adopt IFAB LOTG.

 

Yup - doing GV game between last years state champ (but now depleted by graduation) and a strong contender. Contender dominates the game, but can't score and hits post twice. Ex champ gets a fluke goal and leads 1-0 in the last 5 mins.

Sure enough, we get subs and both me and my partner are doing cross, and blowing whistle and clock keeps running. Losing coach is behind me counting the seconds out loud to put back on the clock. Took over 10 seconds before clock stopped. Then another minute to get them to put it back on..........players who have been going full blast for last 20 mins are standing around wondering what the heck we are doing.

sigh.......

 

That is a local modification. The national rule does not say this. If they winning team is up by one or thirty the clock stops on their sub. Technically.

Edit: original poster corrected the statement and clarified it’s an Ohio modification.

 

Correct. But a strict reading also would require an army of additional support staff to handle subs, the clock, and every other thing. Similar to basketball we would have a huge table of people handling all this. I’ve yet to hear of a state that FULLY follows the nfhs rules on soccer.

 

So are you the one that gets to countdown the last 10 seconds of the half as well? Of course if you aren't using the scoreboard as the "official time" (as others here said that IS the NFHS rule). I do believe some states have stopped it @ 2 minutes and then it is kept by officials, but I don't think that is the norm.

Someone is responsible for counting down the last 10 seconds. I don't care who, but I ask someone to do it. It has come in handy, with shots going in AFTER the count reads zero.

 

Actually an on field referee keeping the clock on their own watch is expressly forbidden from counting down the last 10 seconds.

 

5.3.2.i. The head referee shall "instruct the timer to correct the clock, when necessary."

This was added after discussion about this very topic on this site. You're welcome.

 

Remember that NFHS and NCAA are school sports. There is no other school sport where the clock is not visible and official. And, it must be said, a visible clock eliminates the whining in "time added on" by the team that's ahead by a goal and can't believe that you haven't ended the game already.

 

The countdown over the PA system is huge. If you don't have it, it can result in big potential problems.

I was AR1 and the trail AR in a boys varsity match last spring. The clock is running down under 10 seconds, and the attacking team is scrambling to take a corner kick. As soon as I don't hear the countdown over the PA, I get myself into a position where my center can see me out of the corner of his eye. I'm his eyes on the clock. SInce I knew offside wasn't an issue, I come 10-15 yards down the sideline into the attacking half and onto the track. Clock hits 0:00, I pop my flag. Center whistles right away. 2-3 seconds after the whistle, the ball is in the back of the net. Had there been a PA announcement of the countdown, we have no issue. But not having the countdown forced me to improvise to help in any way I could.

I have a document about clock stoppages that I provide to the clock operators. I have not included a reminder about the audible PA countdown, but I'll probably add that now.

As others have said, forcing official time to be kept on a scoreboard clock is more trouble than it's worth. More than anything else in the high school rules, I just wish NFHS and college would allow us to keep time like the rest of the soccer world. They assume people watching the game can't keep track of time without a scoreboard, when any parent who has a kid that's played club and is interested in time knows they can run a stopwatch on their watch or phone. Even when I attend a pro match and the countup time is on the scoreboard, I still run my Referee Watch app on my Garmin to estimate stoppage time.

 

Not really. They just quibble over the fact that you added 10 seconds back to the clock rather than 11.

I was part of a crew that was chased off the field by coaches and players for a state final because they felt cheated out of 45 seconds. When in reality our watches actually had less time than the official clock, we chose to give them the benefit of the doubt and didn’t take away more.

Absolutely. The countdown and the horn are critical, I would argue the horn even more so. There is no way to accurately account for the exact moment time expires without it if you don’t have the scoreboard directly in site line of the AR that is the one tracking the ball over the goal line.

 

Speaking of the horn, especially in your early season games, make sure the darn thing works. Once I had a clock run out in the first half and ... silence. "Oh yeah, our horn is broken." Now I ask.

Where are you getting this coundown over the PA from? Is that a local thing? We don't do it, and there's nothing in the rules about it other than Rule 6.2.3's "The official timer shall: ... c. countdown verbally the last 10 seconds of each period of play to the nearest official" and the 5.3.2 play ruling quoted above.

 

If the official timer is on the PA then the only way to do that is through the loudspeaker.

And yeah it’s always amusing the schools that will say the horn doesn’t work but then I’ll ask by it worked last Friday when they were playing pointy ball. They tend to act sheepish and say they’ll double check to see if it was fixed.

 

Why would they need a horn in "pointyball"? The game isn't necessarily over when the clock gets to zeros. They get to finish the play once the ball has been snapped.

 

The horn in gridiron football is the same as in basketball. If the shot's in the air at the horn, it still counts if it goes in. I don't think that a similar rule for soccer would work. Imagine a shot is taken but the goalkeeper let's it slip through his hands and in. Should that count? The defense had possession, even if only for a fraction of a second. Come on, ref! Or, even worse, a defender passes back to her keeper the horn goes off and the ball rolls into the goal.

When I was in high school, the end of the quarter in football was signaled with a starter's pistol, not a horn. A lot of reasons that got changed!

And when I was coaching rec soccer, we had a lot of referees that would only respond to players about how much time was left if it was the captain asking them.

 

See Law5’s answer. I don’t officiate football but I’ve been to enough games in the past that there must be some points where the thing is used. Because I’ve seen it and heard it.

 

I was doing a preseason tournament game a few years back where a team scored to take it from 3-0 to 3-1 in the last second, or maybe it was the last negative 2 seconds. The auto-horn had worked in the first half and the previous game... The host coach came up to us and told us, "You ruined the tournament." I was too cold and tired to say, "No coach. It was your keeper whom executed a leg breaking tackle in the first game and your score keeper who somehow turned off the horn that I was waiting for."