Local basketball coaches said earlier this week that adding a running clock in the fourth quarter if a team is ahead by 30 points is a good thing.

On Tuesday, the Alabama High School Athletic Association changed eight of 19 proposals.

Proposal No. 3, concerning a running clock was changed to that a “running clock will be used when a team has a 30-point advantage in the fourth quarter.”

Andalusia coach Richard Robertson, who is on the AHSAA’s Legislative Council, said he voted for it.

“Other states aleady have that rule,” Robertson said. “Florida has it. That’s a mercy rule. Chances are that you aren’t going to win. You’ve got somebody by 30, and they beat you by one or two — that’s highly unusual. It’s just what it says, a mercy rule.”

Robertson equated the new basketball rule to that of the eight-minute rule in football, where if a team leads by a certain margin, the clock will run at eight minutes per quarter.

“That’s one reason why we don’t have a shot clock in high school basketball,” he said.

PHS coach Jerry Davis, who coached in Florida, said it’s nothing new to him.

“We had that in Florida for years,” Davis said. “It’s not a bad idea. It’s just to keep from teams getting humiliated. I played under that situation for one year. It’s not a big deal.”

The legislative council also changed athlete eligibility and recruitment rules for schools.

Proposal 7 will require “that a member school be put on restrictive probation for one year if ruled by the AHSAA to have played an athlete who was ineligible due to a recruiting violation. The restrictive probation would bar the school’s team from participating in state championship play in the sport in which the recruiting violation occurred.”

And proposal 16 states “that a coach at a member school ruled to have been involved in the illegal recruitment of a student-athlete to that school shall be barred from coaching at any AHSAA for one year.”

These new rules will go into effect in the 2012-13 school year.