I find it hard to believe that the mother of a team member whose team failed to score a single point would even know what a full-court press was.
Three-pointers are easy; the score goes up by three points.
Yes, I do. As has been pointed out already many times in this thread, intentionally playing worse and “letting” the other team have free shots would have been a dramatically disrespectful slap in the face. They did the only right thing they could possibly do.
Somehow I suspect the fact that they were female players skewed the perception of those involved. It’s easier to see women as victims. If the circumstances were exactly the same but with male players, I don’t think the coach would have been fired.
Hey, I rarely pay attention to basketball played by females (yeah, I’m such a male prick) but a quick Google search of “lopsided women’s college basketball” produced a LOT of hits.
Now check out this article.
Scores cited in this article?
115-2
77-17
90-2
89-12
98-7
75-25
87-14
93-4
75-3
187-19 (!) don’t believe me, read the article
OK, so this article was from 2003. Obviously this is NOT a new phenomenon.
I might have missed it but is there any evidence that the players from the losing team feel badly? I read about school administrators and parents weighing in, but what about the actual players? It sounds to me like the losing team played to the best of their ability, accepted their loss, but the adults on both sides are making a huge deal over something the kids probably shrugged off a long time ago.
The more I think about that article I cited, the more I wonder…how much of the “problem” can be blamed on asshole coaches and how much is just really unbalanced levels of talent among girls’ basketball teams? I mean, I remember a few weeks ago seeing some NCAAW basketball scores and there were at least a few where the score was something like 90 to 54 or something. Obviously there are WAY more mismatches among women’s basketball than men’s, for whatever reason.
Actually San Marino (Like any other pro football -soccer for you yanks- team) would feel strongly insulted if the other team held back on them in the slightest.
But then again, in football a big lead are five goals or so, and it’s technically possible to score the difference in just minutes, so that makes sense.
I suppose Jesus would just pass and shoot. Surely he couldn’t play D or dribble much with those holes in his hands.
They should have made it at least a proper grubbing and put 200 past them. Only 41 points in the second half? Brian Clough would have fined them all.
If lopsided wins are not acceptable in that league, the league should make a mercy rule (e.g. stop a game once a certain point spread is reached).
Firing a coach for winning by a wide margin is pathetic,
You clearly have never read the news.
I remember growing up in the home of the Gators, that every year for homecoming, they would drag out some tiny school to play so they wouldn’t risk losing in front of all the alumni. I thought it was just about as classless as most other things they did.
Now, I heard about how the tiny school got great exposure, what a thrill it would be for them to play such a mighty team at such a beautiful field and just how dog-gone nice it was for the Gators to wipe those teams up every single freakin’ homecoming.
Perhaps they took advantage of the opportunity to work on their “full court press” strategy (please see location:)). They may as well, they sure as hell werent getting anything else from the game, a simple training session would have been better for them.
I didn’t know the meaning of “running up the score” either.
But what were they expected to do? Could they just declare victory and stop the game? Remove half the players on their side? Pretend not to be able to play well? What?
I too think think it would be more insulting than anything.
You put in your third string players. That allows them to get some game time. Frequently, those players don’t get any game time at all. This also reduces the risk of injury to your best players. A feeding frenzy isn’t safe for sharks and a team hell bent on scoring all they can could easily injure themselves.
If they were really running a full court press throughout the second half, that’s too much. Even so, I object to the school embarrassing its coach and players more than whatever wrong Covenant allegedly committed during the game.
I don’t really have a problem with anyone running up the score on San Marino, because a) the goals count for something, and b) as you note, five-nil can be 5-5 in ten minutes.
In the US, point differential doesn’t count for anything; over here, we use strength of schedule (ie., combined win/loss record of opponents) rather than goal difference to sort our ties.
It’s a bit different in college football, too - the tiny schools that get scheduled as automatic wins get paid very, very well for the privilege of losing to the giant programs- as much as $1 million a year. Losing to UF or USC or Ohio State or whoever can finance your entire season.
From what I understand, the winning team was already playing their whole bench (you don’t really have “3rd string” players in basketball. You have your starters and you have your bench).
Part of the problem was that the losers were a tiny school with only 20 girls in the whole school and only 8 players on the team. They basically shouldn’t have even been playing in that league, much less that team. It was their school and their coach who did them the disservice by putting them into a league where they had no chance to compete. A tiny school like that, with no talent pool for players, should be playing a JV schedule or in some other kind of appropriately calibrated league.
I’ve had my fair share of other teams running up the score. My sophmore year of high school was a in a brand new school where we had no senior class and the sophmore and junior classes came from two different schools. When we played them in football, they left in their starters the whole game, they wouldn’t attempt to punt on the few occassions they had fourth downs, and it was disheartening to lose by a mark of something like 55-0 or 47-0. The next year we went back and played them, but we played hard, played the appropriate strategy (it’s fourth and 4, we should punt), and we took out some starters in the fourth quarter when we were up 35-0. We easily could have done more to score more points, but we didn’t.
In the same year, we played a team we outclassed to the point where we scored 28 points in the first quarter, stuck in the second team and they scored 20 more points, and ended up with the JV team in for the second half. The final was still 48-0.
Running up the score isn’t determined by the point margin, it’s determined by what the team is doing. However, just like it’s demeaning to a team to do things that you wouldn’t normally do to run up the score; I think it’s just as insulting to not put out your best effort. From what I can tell in the article, there’s no information about whether the coach put in back-ups, and shooting 3-pointers doesn’t mean they’re running up the score either. If you’re playing a school that hasn’t won a game in four years, and only has 20 girls in the whole school, chances are they’re going to be horrible. Hell, even when I’ve played basketball against opponents who were way better than me, they couldn’t stop us from scoring at least a little.
That is, I think the fact that they were shut out is pretty telling that the team they were playing weren’t just out-classed, that the difference was on par of a high school team playing a Division I college team, such that they very well could have not been doing anything inappropriate, and still dominated them. Seriously, if you have a 5’10 girl who is athletic, guarding a 5’5 girl who hasn’t played basketball before, how much do you really expect the latter to score unless the first puts forth little effort? At the same time, if the same 5’5 girl is expected to guard her, how is she supposed to do anything to defend her? She could pull up and shoot freely from pretty much anywhere on the floor.
Yes, I’m against running up the score, but there’s just not enough in the article to really say whether that’s what actually happened or not. It looks more like a reaction to the massive margin of victory, and the school being embarassed that it looks like they ran up the score, and less about whether it’s fair that they should have been set to play eachother at all.
This is the correct response.