Beep!
Beep!
Pacific-10 grabs free offer
for electronic clock system
A master’s degree in elec -onic en
gineering isn’t necessary to bt i sports
referee these days.
But it sure helps.
It started five years ago, when the
National Football League wired their
officials so everyone would know
whether Dave Dalby or Art Shell was
guilty of holding.
The tradition continues this season in
the Pacific-10 Conference. All three
basketball referees have been outfitted
with special whistles that will stop the
game clock the moment it is blown.
The system is called the Whistle-Stop
Timer, invented by TCM, Inc., a little
thinktank in North Carolina. A likely
place for basketball gadgetry to ap
pear. As a matter of fact, the Atlantic
Coast Conference was the first to try
the system last year.
The new referee’s helper begins
with a special whistle. When the ref
blows it to stop play, the air travels
through a rubber tube attached to the
whistle's side. The tube travels down
his shirt to a transmitter on his belt. The
transmitter in turn sends a message to a
receiver attached to the scoreboard
and the clock stops.
The transmitter also has a button
which the referee pushes to restart the
clock.
The Pac-10 isn’t paying a cent for the
system. It's on a one-year free trial. But
if the schools agree to go with the
Whistle-Stop next season, it'll cost
them $1,500 each for a clock receiver,
three tranmitters and 24 whistles.
By now, many officials have worked
several games and can offer some
opinions about this new stride into the
electronic age.
"You have to be very careful and
think about what you’re doing,” says
Mack Lai, who has worked three
games, including Oregon’s contest
with Nicholls State. Lai feels the system
works best in situations where the gym
noise becomes unbreachable, break
ing down communication between
referee and scorer’s table.
"The funniest thing," says Lai, “is the
beep.” The scoreboard emits two
beeps when the clock is started or
stopped to tell the referee the system is
working. "It takes a while to get used to
that."
Ron Labetich, an official since 1966,
thinks the Whistle-Stop is a “step in the
right direction.
"It's great because there’s no loss of
time,” Labetich says. “Usually the timer
has to watch for a referee’s arm
movement to stop the clock."
Labetich agreed the system shines
under a screaming din and cites Mac
Court as a thunderous example.
“When you're working the Pit, it gets
so loud that you can't hear the whistle
unless you’re 10 feet from the scorer's
table."
Last Friday, Labetich worked Arizona
State’s triple-overtime win over UCLA.
“It was the loudest game I’ve ever
heard. My ears were ringing two hours
afterward.” He says the special whis
tles made the game easier to officiate.
None of this is meant to imply Whis
tle-Stop has been the miracle cure for
scorers with slow or itchy button
fingers. There have been some in
stances where the ref would blow until
he was blue, but the clock wouldn’t
stop.
The scorer is the backup system in
this case. If he sees the whistle blow
and the clock keeps running, he stops
the clock himself.
One who feels this has happened a
bit too often is Pac-10 Public Relations
Director Jim Muldoon.
“From our point of view, it doesn’t
seem to be working out," Muldoon
says. “I was just talking to some of the
timers in Arizona, and they had some
problems over the weekend."
Will the Pac-10 blow the whistle on
Whistle-Stop? Only timers will tell.
Story by Jody Murray
Graphic by Ken Babbs
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