South Medford's Jackson Weiland shoots for two points against North Medford during the first quarter Tuesday evening in Medford. 

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a three-part series addressing rule changes made for the 2023-24 high school basketball season.

Given the chance, Jackson Weiland is like any playmaking point guard should be, striving to dart up the basketball court with the pedal to the metal amid high hopes of creating instant offense.

In his fourth year as a starter for the South Medford boys basketball team, Weiland has enjoyed such freedom with the Panthers — who twice eclipsed the 110-point mark last season — but not nearly as much of a green light as the 2023-24 season expects to bring with the introduction of a 35-second shot clock.

With the Oregon School Activities Association finally implementing a rule change many in the state — especially players like Weiland — have requested for years, the idea of being more assertive and intentional with each offensive possession is a welcomed addition to a sport that often could see the rhythm taking out of the game as teams took the air out of the ball.

Now, Weiland and company have a shot at more offensive possessions, and less chance of watching games get bogged down by time-draining efforts on the defensive end.

And that fits the South Medford senior, as well as many of his peers throughout the Rogue Valley, like a glove.

“We’re a team that likes to play fast and a lot of teams try to slow us down to waste time,” said Weiland. “So it’s definitely a little bit of a benefit for us, for sure.”

The shot clock will take away the ability for teams to completely control the flow with methodical approaches, meaning more shots and the possibility of more possessions for each team should all go as planned.

Weiland also noted how it will help value the skill of the players over team strategy. He pointed to last year’s games against Willamette, when South Medford won 87-53 in the first meeting but the next game was a closer victory (62-52) after the Wolverines stagnated the flow of the game without a looming shot clock to deter that plan.

It’s been a tried-and-true approach for any team that doesn’t feel as if it stacks up as well as its opponent on a given night — certainly nothing isolated to one school as in the example given — but that doesn’t mean players like Weiland wouldn’t rather see an outcome derived more from skill than scheme.

“They just made it their effort to just hold the ball and pass it back and forth in the halfcourt and just really slow the game down,” Weiland said about last year’s game in Eugene. “We were kind of just standing there waiting for them to do something, so it’s definitely a good thing that they can’t do that anymore because I think that is not how basketball is meant to be played.”

With the Panthers having played outside of Oregon for tournaments over the years, Weiland is excited that other players will experience the shot clock and the speed it adds to the game.

“It’s something that we have to adjust to a little bit,” he said. “We just have to be prepared, be aware of the shot clock and then when the shot clock runs down, we will go into our last-second set.”

On the flip side, defenses will be rewarded even more whenever they get a stop, so long as they end the defensive possession with a rebound.

That’s a factor appreciated by Sage Winslow of the Crater girls basketball team, which has thrived defensively under head coach Scott Dippel but now could gain even more of an advantage by their defensive tenacity.

Winslow, a junior guard, has been a point-of-attack defender for the Comets and helped them hold five different opponents under 20 points last year. The shot clock should only make the press defense that Crater employs more daunting given how much Winslow and her teammates love to run.

“We do a lot of full-court pressing and we’re running a lot and we’re always in shape,” said Winslow. “We’re really good at stopping teams and keeping them where we want them.”

Most importantly, Winslow sees the shot clock acting as an extra defender to help the cause on that end of the court.

“We would already get a lot of 10-second calls before this, so we can still force that,” said Winslow. “When it gets to halfcourt, they will only have like 15 seconds before they’re going to start making bad passes and rush shots.”

“We’ll be able to get really good at making defensive plays off of stuff like that,” she added.

Similar to Weiland’s experience, Winslow has had to endure teams holding the ball and killing the buzz of the game.

“They’ll pass it around the perimeter and they’ll wait till they get exactly what they want,” Winslow said about Springfield’s patient play in recent years, albeit for the better more often than not for the championship-contending Millers. “Having the shot clock is definitely going to help us against them because they like to stall.”

Now, Winslow will have more motivation to play hard for 35 seconds and not be lulled to sleep by passing in the frontcourt.

“They are going to start rushing stuff and throwing up bad shots,” Winslow said of teams not prepared to make quicker decisions. “We’ll get that on defense and it’ll give us more motivation to be aggressive.”

It bears noting, however, that 35 seconds to get a shot off still is a reasonably long time for players and teams, it’s not necessarily expected to create a free-for-all frenzy of shots with no passing or set plays.

With the addition of a shot clock, though, Austin Maurer of the Cascade Christian boys basketball team believes Oregon hoops will change for the better.

“It’ll make high school basketball in Oregon much better because it speeds up the game,” said Maurer. “There’s more possessions, there’s more skill that’s gonna be required because there’s going to be less time on offense that you can run (set plays) because you have to be able to play with a higher pace.”

The 7-foot senior center highlighted decision-making, shot selection and court awareness as the main skills that will improve throughout the state as players will get more possessions to practice and control in the games.

He believes schools at all classifications will benefit from it, even the smaller schools like Maurer’s 3A Challengers will reap the benefits.

“A couple years from playing with that, it’ll just improve everybody’s game and the overall team’s game,” said Maurer.

A recent Grand Canyon University signee, Maurer isn’t a stranger to a shot clock after playing AAU basketball featuring an NBA-level 24-second shot clock.

However, the changes will incur some growing pains on offense, as the senior center recalled three consecutive shot clock violations in the first game of summer league play.

“It’s been different, people are getting used to it, looking for it and paying attention to it,” he said.

Maurer also said the presence of a shot clock should help better prepare him for the collegiate level, forcing him to adapt to a faster pace that he’ll be expected to play at a year from now. He admitted that getting into sets as fast as possible so that his team can get a quality shot off will be a priority for him.

“I have to set up my positioning early,” he said. “You can’t just swing it back and forth trying to get the perfect shot. So I think it will just make me work harder earlier to get a good shot.”

With the players on board with the new shot clock rules, time will tell how quickly everyone adjusts to the new environment.

One thing players like Weiland, Winslow and Maurer agreed on, though, is how excited they are for the opportunity to test it all out this winter.