The only issue I have with this is that it’s been done in other leagues, and what happens when the team gets close to that point? I remember one article, years ago, where a similar situation was happening, but there was a rule where if one team ended the game ahead by X points, the coach gets suspended. At some point the coach was only putting 4 players on the court to limit scoring and they still crossed that amount.
If you don’t want blowouts, do what reasonable people have suggested and have a mercy rule, then stop complaining when the mercy rule is reached.
Here’s what I don’t get, what should the coach have done? The idea of purposely missing shots or not shooting or letting the other team score is asinine. So you put in the reserves, run down the shot-clock (anyone else notice they can’t have a running clock until the 4th quarter) and you STILL outscore them 60-1 (or whatever it was). Do you teach the kids to make no effort whatsoever and just have them sit on the court? Insult the other team playing 3 on 5? And I disagree with Dr. Johnson in that you don’t teach kids to work on thing that are an antithesis to fundamentals re: big men shooting from outside or not guarding outside the lane. You can work on some skills you may need later on like a box and 1 but sometimes even that’s not enough to prevent a blowout.
Too late to edit.
So the winning coach did a half-court trap the 2nd half and maybe that’s overkill although it sounds like he plays a trapping defense 100% of the time. Other considerations.
Tell a bench player not to shoot 3’s?
So that’s the coach’s fault?
Suspend the referees for 2 games since they were part of the blowout.
And they still made shots? What an asshole. He should have broken the girls fingers so they couldn’t shoot as well.
Years ago I coached my sons in an indoor soccer league. They were just a bunch of my kid’s friends but they also happened to be very good players. One game we were killing the other team. At one point the other coach came over fuming and saying I was being a horrible person for running the score up. I asked him to count how many players I had on the field (I was playing two kids down). I also pointed out that my forwards were playing in the back and my defenders in the front. They also had to pass at least 5 times before shooting, and they could only shoot with their non-dominant foot. I even told the best kid that I didn’t want him to score. He smacked the ball next to the goal many times in frustration making it clear that he could have scored but didn’t. I think that was just as demoralizing to the other team as if he had scored. I couldn’t pull him completely though because in that league we were supposed to give everyone equal playing time.
I asked the other coach what other ideas he had and he sheepishly went back to his box. It is a bit of a catch 22. You want the kids to learn and develop, but you don’t want to beat up on others. You can only come up with so many handicaps sometimes.
That said… 162-2 I think I could have come up with some more handicaps.
There are many game theorists who would disagree with you on that point.
And there are many times where businesses go easy on the competition. Just ask Apple, Simon & Schuster Inc, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group, Macmillan, and HarperCollins.
In fact, Winner-Take-All types are rarely the most successful. Mainly because those who take without giving anything in return get branded as damaged goods by those who associate with them. No one wants to work with them anymore.
Adam Grant’s book Give and Take is a great read for these kinds of arguments. In it he describes the three forms of reciprocity: Takers, Matchers, and Givers.
The least successful people are more heavily represented by Givers than Matchers or Takers. This probably isn’t all that surprising.
However, the most successful people are also more heavily represented by Givers than Matchers or Takers, which might prove surprising.
But there are good reasons for why both these situations occur, and I won’t get into them here because I’ve sidetracked this enough.
So life is not a winner-take-all game. Takers can only get away with it so long before they end up being shunned (or arrested).
It’s pretty hard to not run up the score in basketball. They were already letting the shot clock run all the way down. What else were they supposed to do? Miss on purpose? Hand the ball to the other team? Take shots on the wrong basket?
I’m curious to see how many shots the other team took, and how many were blocked instead of misses.
The specific idea was to either lower the level of competition, or not keep score at all (per the author), so as to spare the opposing team from an otherwise wide gap in performance, or the acknowledgement of it. That’s exactly what they are doing.
I was on a field hockey team in high school that lost a couple of games by scores of 18-0 and 16-0. It didn’t bother our team much, although it upset our coach. But this is way beyond that, and the other field hockey teams definitely weren’t playing any starters past the first quarter.
The thing is, while this particular score stood out, it’s just an extreme example in what looks like a consistently lopsided league. Looking through a few articles, there exist a bunch of other blowouts among the teams. A number of games have as many as 30-60 point spreads, and the same team who only scored 2 points in this story, lost another game by as many as 90ish points. Meanwhile, the other team, even without their coach, went on to win one of their next games by near 60 points, proving these girls are just that good.
Setting the headline grabbing example aside, this is why I want to know where the arbitrary line is drawn, between a dominant win and what people feel is unsportsmanlike. Realistically there probably isn’t one, which is why the league probably doesn’t have hard rules in place for it. But while the number remains shocking news, it’s a distraction from the real issue, which is the obvious divide in talent. I don’t think punishing good players by benching them is exactly fair, but I do think it’s somewhat remedied with a mild handicap (at which point, the other team has to step it up). Not keeping score is pointless (no pun), since it removes incentive to compete, but at the end of the day, the refs, league, and players were all part of it. The coach took responsibility, but he’s between a rock and a hard place, while the actual issue persists.
put players in positions they were not used to playing
must complete 5 or more passes before attempting a shot
play zone defense and do not guard out side the lane
big men shoot only outside shots, outside shooters can only shoot in the lane
only certain players can shoot (generally the worst shooters on the team)
#1 & 2, the coach in question did this. #4, the coach in question ran down the shot clock #3, 5 and 6 I would never do as it teaches the kids the wrong way to play the sport #7 is just retarded. You’re telling a player on the court - a BENCH player no less that they are not allowed to shoot?
I once played on a junior high soccer team that played in a high school league. We were routinely trounced. It sucked but we knew we were outclassed so it wasn’t overwhelming. Second to the last game of the season, our last home game, we finally won our one and only game that season. I will say this, that moment made the rest of the season so worth it.
As a caveat, soccer is a horrible sport to talk about mismatches. Soccer scores are generally so low that truly any team can beat any other team and we proved that rule. We were nowhere near as talented, big, or fast as them but that day, the bounces went our way.
OK, stopping scorekeeping at halftime, per the linked article, is indeed dumb. I meant the suggestions here, having to do with increasing the challenge for the better team, putting limits on their play so as to tilt the playing field away from themselves. This isn’t protecting mediocrity, it’s doing something about it–providing a more useful and sporting challenge for both teams. You don’t think what actually happened was worth anything for the dominant team, do you? That it helped prepare them to meet opponents on their own level?
I don’t play basketball, but I’ve played other sports, and I play cards competitively, and I would never play to less than my fullest abilities until the competition is over.
A rule that ends the contest when one team is sufficiently far ahead is fine. If the game is over enough for one team to stop trying to score points, then the game is over enough to be over. Putting in 2nd and 3rd string is a great idea, but so they get some more experience, not because it spares the other team the humiliation of losing.
I’d be insulted if I were losing and the other team went easy on me. I’d want to know that if I managed to score a single point, I did it against their best attempts to stop me.
No, it isn’t. Life is not a competition. You cherry picked a few situations where there is a competition, but the majority of life is not one. If it were, things like empathy or helping out other people would be wrong.
Thew whole “winner take all” is not something you have to teach. It’s natural because we are all born selfish. What we have to teach is the opposite, to avoid creating psychopaths who repeat Ayn Rand’s bullshit about how helping people out is wrong unless it benefits you, since you are the only person who matters.
The team that is behind can simply choose not to play, in which case the game ends in a forfeit with the current score as the final score; however, in some leagues, this could result in penalties against not just the team, but the school.
Throw the ball at the other team’s players’ legs, then get the officials to call a “kick”, which resets the shot clock (and California still uses the “old” shot clock rule where all resets are to the full time, not to 15)?
A sensible alternative might be to turn the game into a giant practice by the better team putting the ball out of bounds in places where they could then work on certain defensive situations. For example, throw the ball out underneath the other team’s basket, then work on guarding against throw-ins from that spot.
Was it 6 fouls in the game, or 6 in the second half? Also, how many of those fouls resulted in free throws?
However, what it should come down to is, how did the losing team feel about what the winning team did? Would they have “accepted” the other team committing shot clock violations just to burn off time?
