Oh, I was making an argument? Here I thought I was asking a question. Your insulting tone is completely unnecessary when you could have simply answered the question. Here’s a shocker: there’s actually millions of people who don’t follow sports closely enough to have intimate knowledge of all the minutiae of rules and strategy. Apparently I’m supposed to learn this stuff via magic or something. (Ironically, my elementary school basketball coach treated me the same way. No discussion on what the rules were or of strategy the entire season. I didn’t bother to go a second season because I had no idea what I was doing and it seemed there was no one who both knew the information and planned to tell me. Mom tried to help but she didn’t know any more than I did.)
Aaaand this is exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe you’d care to explain in plain English wtf you’re on about, here. A curl? Box out? Set a pick? Huh?
FWIW, I have no idea what a “zone defense” is either, passive or 2-3 or otherwise. Nor do I have any idea what a full court press is.
In any case, I still feel that cutting yourself off at the knees to give a head-pat to the other guy is extremely patronizing. There was simply no “good” way to handle this – you either play normally and blow them out of the water, or you patronize them. I’d have to think that the losing team’s coach/athletic director/players realized how bad they are, given that they haven’t won in four years. Really, it was on them to figure out if playing against impossible odds was worth it for them – I don’t think it could be argued that any loss of theirs was a surprise.
My HS swim team had a similar record. It was pretty rare that we won a meet. We still did our best, and none of us were looking for softballs from the other team, either. We had no illusions that we were an awesome team; but I would have been pretty insulted and pissed had I seen swimmers deliberately slowing their times. I would have felt, and rightly so, that they meant to make fun of me.
And I admire the coach for publicly standing up for his girls. Publicly blaming/shaming the players for being good at their game was ridiculous, and I admire his loyalty to them.
Another report said that the winning team was almost conducting layup drills. Their shooting percentage would be very high. It’s pretty clear that the losing team was completely unable to compete on any level with this team. I don’t know…I mean, I get the whole bit about sportsmanship and not being mean to teenage girls and all that…but to me sportsmanship is more like the incident with the injured softball player, or with someone helping up someone from the opposing team or whatever. Even when I’m playing pickup basketball and my team is getting trounced, I don’t want the other team to start doing anything other than playing their best against us.
But in the games where I’ve been on the side of the trouncers, and the opposing player loses the ball at halfcourt and I’m there to pick up the ball and I have a clear path to the basket…what am I supposed to do? Pull up and wait for even numbers? I haven’t played with that rule since I was in 4th grade.
So what’s left, if the coaches and officials and players determine that the game should go on? “OK, but you, winning coach, have to promise to instruct your players to take a long, long time between shots and not to play defense and wait for the other team to catch up if there’s a turnover.” That’s ridiculous. The girls said they wanted to keep playing, they did, they’re proud that they stuck it out, and despite some momentary frustration, it doesn’t seem like any of them are going to need any special therapy. It’s not like they were gang-raped by monkeys in clown makeup.
Nah, I don’t think anybody would have found it patronizing. Apparently other teams they have played and lost to have been able to do it in a non-patronizing fashion.
The more video I watch of interviews with the coach and girls on the losing team, the more I like them. I’ll grant that they don’t seem to be quite as bad as the first video I watched made them out to be. It’s clear though from their statements that they really aren’t playing to win anyway (they explicitly said as much) and their goal is that someday, somehow, they’ll be able to score points (this being in one of the video interviews). They have a lot of character.
Still, the game should never have taken place. This was against one of the best teams in their region or division or whatever. They haven’t won a game in over 4 years. The girls on both teams were put into a pretty hopeless situation by whoever scheduled the games.
Well, let’s be serious, here. Your tone wasn’t really one of genuine curiosity, which you emphasize yourself by saying “in any case I still feel…” You were expressing your opinion notwithstanding your lack of expertise, which is what, I think, Cheesesteak was responding to. But I do apologize if I got a little jargony there.
In any event, what I was saying was that, in essence, the winning team could have just slowed down the tempo a bit. It isn’t really the case that “playing normally” absolutely had to lead to such an incredible result; as in most team sports (not a timed meet competition like swimming), there are ways to play a more controlled style, win handily, and not create such a humiliating outcome. They could have, on offense, played a more precision style that emphasized moving the ball around and getting a player wide open for a shot, which would naturally take a while to develop each time. And on defense they could have played a style that kept the opponent from getting close to the basket, but which didn’t emphasize going after the player with the ball to create a turnover (which in both cases wouldn’t be patronizing because those are legitimate styles that many teams play even against top competition). This would have naturally slowed down the game, effectively keeping the numbers from getting so big, because each team would be taking a longer time in between shots. That’s all. Nothing like letting the other team score, or only playing with 4 girls on the court, or anything that would be outwardly evident of some kind of purposeful self-sabotage.
Cuckoorex, pickup games are different, obviously - no clock, for one thing. In the high school situation, presumably the opponent would seldom be losing it at half-court if you have your defense playing a reasonable zone and not pressuring, because why in the fuck would you be pressuring? Again, tempo is a choice. You can’t control the opponent’s ability, but you can control whether or not you’re running the ball back up down their throats and conducting layup drills. Conduct a half-court offense drill.
If these teams are in a small league, and it is known that these kind of games can happen, it is the league’s responsibility (in my opinion) to take that into account when setting rules for the league. Jim coaches in a very competitive baseball league (graduates from their league go on to get baseball scholarships and major league contracts), and they have mercy rules to prevent running up scores. The coaches should know the unwritten rules for their sport, too, which probably include how to handle a blowout like that.
As the article I cited on the second page says, there is no mercy rule in high school basketball. And blowouts even worse than this happen with surprising frequency in women’s basketball on many levels of competition. Obviously there is a huge gap in skill level in women’s basketball, and I’m not sure how to address this without basically saying, “OK, you guys are pretty good, you’re in this division, but you guys couldn’t put the ball in the hoop if you were sitting on the backboard, you go in this division.”
I like to think that I was insulting while attempting to answer the question. Let me remove any insulting tone and try to explain my side more clearly.
Basketball lends itself to a number of different offensive and defensive strategies. Since basketball is a sport that alternates possession after scoring, slowing down the game and scoring less frequently does not inherently make it more difficult to win a game, since your opponent gets fewer opportunities to score as well.
On offense, you can choose to run the ball to your side of the court as fast as possible, to catch the defense “in transition” and shoot quickly to prevent them from setting up their defense. You can also choose to walk the ball up the court, set up your offense, run a play that involves multiple passes, and shoot when the opportunity arises.
On defense you can choose a “full court press” where you attack the ball carrier the instant they get the ball, and try to force them to lose possession. You can also choose a “half court” defense where, on a change of possession, you go back to the opponent’s basket and set up your defense there.
Well, add me to the list of posters saying they don’t know what else could be done. I think dialing back your efforts because your opponents suck is more insulting than beating them into the ground.
At the very least, the coach should have had no starters in after the second quarter. Not only would this temper what was going to be a lopsided victory anyway, some of the less talented payers would have had an opportunity to play more.
I just don’t get this train of reasoning, I will admit - one that many posters whose opinion I respect have posted. Why on earth would it be more insulting to refrain from humiliating your opponent, then to pull back a bit and continue to win without doing that? There are very simple ways, that Jimmy Chitwood has outlined, that the coach could have employed to avoid the score running up.
Is sports really more about humiliation than about sportsmanship? In high school?
Furthermore, for those that have commented that they’ve never heard of the concept of “running up the score” - trust me, it’s an integral part of the conversation in many sports in the US, particulary college football.
You know, the Dallas players don’t sound very humiliated, based on what I’ve read in the articles posted here. A lot of people are arguing in public they were hurt and humiliated, but I don’t see it.
Some of the suggestions here could’ve been used - I at least would have walked the ball up the court, sat the point guard who went for 48, slowed the game down, and not pressed. We’ve got completely conflicting accounts of this game: Covenant continued to press or didn’t, hoisted up threes or didn’t… so that’s essentially useless. Some of the distinctions being drawn here are also useless in my opinion: who decided it’s less embarrassing if the winning team is taking jumpshots instead of making layups? How would it be better if they intentionally didn’t rebound? It’d be very obvious if they did that, and therefore not helpful. The idea of “not running up the score” isn’t that you stop trying entirely.
Apparently, they figured out exactly how to do that immediately after scoring 12 points in the fourth quarter to bring the score to 100 even. They did not score in the last four minutes of the game.
How exactly, do you think they managed to do that?
I also wonder how it is that some people are just so ignorant of differing basketball strategies? Do you sit at home and scratch your heads when a team that is winning towards the end of the game isn’t sprinting down on offense like they were at the beginning of the game? Phrases like “taking the air out of the ball” must completely elude you folks.
We have a 10-run mercy rule after 5 innings in our baseball league. This is partly for good sportsmanship reasons and partly so teams in a blow-out aren’t forced to burn pitchers needlessly. We also have a gentleman’s agreement between the coaches that you can go as hard as you want to acheive that 10 run lead, but that you call off the dogs after that and stop stealing bases and bunting and such. When someone violates those unwritten rules, things start to get nasty, because no one likes to get shit canned when the opposition is clearly that much better. Unnecessarily hard tags and the hit batsman are the consequences of running up the score and it isn’t a case of the coaches on the losing side instructing their kids to ramp up the aggression – it’s a case of highly competitive kids not appreciating getting their noses rubbed in it. The league routinely places 10 or more athletes into college baseball programs every year and the only two players ever to get to the Majors from our city both played their ball in our league (Ryan Radmanovich and Chris Reitsma, if you want to look it up). So it’s pretty high level ball.
As to the story at hand, I have to agree that the winning team was placed in a no-win situation. Play to your level of ability and beat the living shit out of the other team and look like a bunch of bullies or screw around the entire game, do nothing to improve your squad, and embarass the other team by going all Harlem Globetrotters on them and killing the clock with your five-man weave drills at half court.
If the girls on the Covenant team have been trained how to play the game, they wouldn’t have to put much effort into getting the required number of shots – walk the ball up court, take your pick of an uncontested layup or an uncontested jump shot, pull down an uncontested rebound under the basket and score on the uncontested put-back if the initial shot didn’t go down. I can certainly see how a team could score 100 more-or-less by accident, even with the three bench players on the floor for the entire game (except those first five minutes when they scored one quarter of their totalpoints). It has not been my experience with 13-year-old athletes that they are particularly good at adjusting away from their training, so if they see an open shot, they most likely will take it and if they grab an offensive rebound, they’ll put it back in the net rather than kicking it out to set up another play. Also, and this hasn’t been discussed yet in this thread, when it comes to competitive fire IME female athletes are miles ahead of males – when they smell blood in the water, they are ruthless and pretty unapologetic about it too. I can see a scenario where the coach instructed the girls to dial it down a notch or two, and they tried, but when they got possession (which was frequently), they drove straight for the basket, irrespective of coaching to back off and set up their half-court offense or whatever. Also, given the track record for lopsided scores in girl’s high-school basketball, the coach might not have even thought this particularly out-of-the-ordinary. If girl’s basketball doesn’t have a mercy rule, and the Covenant team demonstrably backed off by scoring 18 fewer points in the second half, I don’t see what the coach had to apologize for.
And the parents getting all bent about all the cheering? What the fuck ever. People cheer at sporting events. Now if the losers were getting booed, that would be a little different, but I’ve seen nothing to indicate that that was the case.
This whole situation was made possible by what is clearly a deeply flawed system within the league, not within a particular school’s basketball program. I don’t see any major issues in the coach’s conduct during the game. He most certainly should have kept his refusal to apologize between himself and the faculty that publicly condemned him and his team. And I respect the guy for standing up for his team. Looks to me like this was just a bad scenario from the start, made worse by all the bitching and unnecessary apologizing and such. I say change the rules to eliminate the possibility of such lopsided scores or shut the fuck up and let them play.
Well, you’re actually assuming a lot there. “In any case I still feel” comes directly out of my own personal experience as a competitive HS athlete, in my case the swim team. Individual times on races were a matter of public record – they were used for seeding heats at the large meets, and in one-on-one meets the fastest girls were placed in the center lanes to help reduce uneven wake turbulence in the water. My best time in the 500 meter was a minute behind the best times of the best swimmers in the league. Believe me… a minute in a race is a looooong time. If I was matched up against one of these better swimmers, and she was basically swimming the entire race with her feet at my nose, I would have come to the conclusion that she was mocking me – that my best efforts were so irrelevant to her that she didn’t even bother to try to beat her own best time, it was actually more amusing to her to basically say “Come on little’un! Catch up! You can do it! pat pat pat! Wuzza matta?”
No one adds a minute to their time unless they’re deliberately throwing the race. I certainly wouldn’t have gotten a self-esteem boost from something like that. I’d have felt she was trying to deliberately humiliate me.
I can see what you’re saying, but I’d have to think that the sudden downshift in tempo would be rather noticeable to the losing team. This addresses Cheesesteak’s response too. And again we take a sharp left into “patronizing.”
I totally agree with this. If a blowout is too humiliating to handle, they need to decide on mutually acceptable mercy rules, and clearly outline them, so no one has to play guessing games in terms of just what course of action is going to be deemed mean-spirited.