Varsity basketball games will have two 18-minute halves next season

Beginning next season WIAA varsity boys and girls basketball games will have two 18-minute halves.
Beginning next season WIAA varsity boys and girls basketball games will have two 18-minute halves. Credit: Corey Wilson

By Mark Stewart of the Journal Sentinel

June 25, 2015 4

Stevens Point— High school basketball in Wisconsin will have a different look next season.

The WIAA Board of Control voted, 7-4, on Thursday to play its varsity boys and girls basketball games in two 18-minute halves for a one-year trial next season. Junior varsity and freshman games will be played in 16-minute halves.

The change will lengthen varsity games by four minutes. The long-standing rule has been four eight-minute quarters.

This will be the second time in recent years that the WIAA has experimented with halves vs. quarters. During the 2009-'10 season schools had the option of using 16-minute halves for regular-season non-conference games.

"There wasn't a widespread use of the experiment option that year," said WIAA associate director Deb Hauser, who overseas basketball. "Those who tried it liked it."

The rule would put the Wisconsin game in line with how the game is played at the college and club levels. There is some thought that it will cause coaches to use more players because games would be four minutes longer than the old rule allowed.

There also is hope that the change will improve game flow. With quarter play, teams would often hold the ball for final shot in the final minute or so rather than run their offense as they would do normally.

The switch from quarters to halves also will force a couple of other rules to be adjusted. The mercy rule will now be applied with nine minutes left in the second half for varsity rather than at the start of the fourth quarter and the five-quarter rule, which limits the number of quarters a player can play in one day, becomes the three-halves rule.

Hauser surveyed 943 head coaches in the state. Of the 696 who responded, 68.4% were in favor of halves.

"They'll probably be a survey at some point during the course of the season to say is this something you'd like to see continue in the future," Hauser said. "We'll survey the head boys and girls basketball coaches and get their sense of is this something you want."

In other WIAA news:

■ The mercy rule will be applied to freshman and junior varsity games starting next season. In the new half format, the rule would take affect during the final eight minutes. During those final eight minutes the clock will run continuously unless a timeout is called any time a team leads by 40 points or more.

■ Basketball brackets will be set up as half brackets with no allowance for schools to vote on changing the design. Previously sectional brackets were split into regionals and would only be placed as a half bracket if 60% of the schools in that portion of the bracket voted for it.

A measure that would have given schools the option to vote to seed an entire sectional failed, 11-0.

■ The schedule of boys and girls state tournaments will change next season in hopes of boosting attendance. The Division 3 semifinals have been moved from Friday morning to Thursday afternoon. The Division 5 semifinals, which were played Thursday afternoon, will be played Friday morning.

The rest of the schedule would be the same as past years.

■ For hockey, a measure that would have allowed for the seeding of the boys and girls state tournaments failed, 6-5. The plan would have called for the top four boys teams to be seeded with the remaining four placed by random draw and for all four girls teams to be seeded.

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About Mark Stewart

Mark Stewart is an editor, columnist and reporter covering high school sports.

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