The Harley School in Rochester NY did not have a American style football team in 1980 because they had been tossed out of whichever league the private and parochial schools are in for being the bottom of the barrel losingest school team in the league. [My mom was on the school board in her town that year and was getting all sorts of announcements about western NY schools and that one stuck in my mind as hysterically funny … who would throw out the team that was a guaranteed win … :dubious::rolleyes::p]
Honestly, what is the High School coach of that losing team, delusional that he is playing Pop Warner football?
No, he is just playing the hand he is dealt. The school classification is based on the size of the entire student body. In this case, Western Hills is classified 4A so they play other 4A schools in and around their district. But, oddly for Texas, they can’t field a large or strong enough football team that 4A schools would normally field. It could be that they are also a small 4A school, just a few students over the line and are now stuck in 4A for two years. This happened at my kid’s school. They were 2 students over the line and spent two years playing 5A ball. It was a brutal two years.
The idea that teams shouldn’t “run up the score” (meaning in many cases, don’t play hard) seems to be designed more to spare the coaches’ feelings (or job prospects) than the those of the players.
The philosophy behind “don’t run up the score” or “mercy” rules acts to the detriment of the second or third-stringers, who may only get to play in routs (for either side). So now they’re supposed to just go through the motions?
There’s no mercy rule for 11-man football, but both coaches can agree to end a game early. Coach Buchanan said he wasn’t aware of that option, though. And I doubt the other coach would have been willing to concede defeat. He disagreed with the bullying allegations and he realized Buchanan tried all he could do to not run the score even higher.
My high school had a very poor field hockey team. I played practically every minute (I was a fullback, and mindbogglingly unathletic) and we lost nearly every game, often by scores of 17-0, which is probably about equivalent to 91-0 in a football game.
You know what? I didn’t care. It was fun, and good exercise, and looked good on my college resume. I sure didn’t think I was being bullied. (I switched to another sport in college—fencing.)
If professional games stopped when one team is clearly superior to the other, la Liga would need a new “us two looking down on everybody else” division and it wouldn’t be possible to have the bottom dudes in Segunda going against the Primera leader in la Copa… sometimes they have a superb day and win; most often, you get to watch the “losers” grinning on TV saying “it’s been a privilege and a pleasure” and showing off their autographed T-shirts.
I think that people who believe that the only purpose of games is to win are missing on a lot of fun.
I would (eleventy!), but I’m the one who asked for it (after the other thread was pointed out to me).
What I hate most about this, I will repeat, is that it dilutes the significance of real bullying, which is still an actual problem. I suffered from a modest amount of bullying when I was in high school (fortunately I was taller than nearly everyone so the real cowards left me alone) and that was nothing like this.
Roddy
nearwildheaven, I’m not certain what the deal is with the rape comments, but this is the second time recently that you’ve dropped a completely out-of-place comment like that in a thread.
The advice you were given last time stands – if you want to have a discussion like this, start a separate thread and link to it.
My high school was small compared to all its competitor schools (our graduating class was 55) and our teams rarely did well. My freshman year, we were undefeating. We did considerably better the next year, winning one game.
I didn’t play, but I di watch, and even (nerd alert) had joined the band by the last two years so saw all the games, and even in games where we got creamed were worth playing, and playing to the end. The football team worked their asses off and did well with what they had to work with. (Our soccer team, on the other hand, was mostly ignored by school management but creamed the competitors. We had lots of South and Central American students, unlike the other schools.)
I remember a lot of lopsided games, but I don’t remember a single one where the team wanted to quit before the clock ran out, and I did see some great plays in the final moments.
Life lessons. Far more important than winning or losing, or how unbalanced the score might be in a given game.
The father who filed the complaint is an idiot. I have no doubt that he will be soundly ridiculed. I hope he learns a lesson, rather than simply sticking to his guns or caving to public opinion. The lesson: Life sometimes deals us these hands, and we should play them the best way we can, and not blame the other side if they play a better hand the best they can.
It’s called “sportsmanship.” Also “acting with class.” Only bullies beat up on a weaker opponent, especially in amateur sports.
The coach of the winning team knew the concept. His team badly outmatched the other, and no one would have gotten anything more out of the game by scoring more points.
What more could the winning coach have done? Had his players run 3.5 yards and kneel down each play? As a coach and player, I would be far more humiliated if the other team resorted to those type tactics instead of continuing to play hard. Sometimes you are paired against someone far more talented than you. Sometimes you are going to get your butt handed to you. It happens in all sports and it happens in life.
Here are a couple of excerpts from the poems of Henry Grantland Rice (1880-1954) that illustrate why I think that it is important to play hard, regardless of winning, losing, or point spread.
“You’ll find the bread-line hard to buck and fame’s goal far away,
But hit the line and hit it hard across each rushing play;
For when the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name—
He marks—not that you won or lost—but how you played the game.” The Answer
No matter where you finish in the mix-up or the row,
There are those among the rabble who will pan you anyhow;
But the entry who is sticking and delivering the stuff,
Can listen to the yapping as he giggles up his cuff;
The loafer has no come-back and the quitter no reply,
When the Anvil Chorus echoes, as it will, against the sky;
But there’s one quick answer ready that will wrap them in a hood, Make good.
Specifically what should the coach have done beyond pulling his better players and giving his lesser players more field time, which he did fairly early on?
Tell his players to stop scoring and let the opposition score some to even things up? That would be very unsporting, for it would be an insult to the opposing team as well as contrary to the game itself.
Loan some players to the opposing side to even things up? That works well when a team is shorthanded (aside from whatever league rules might prevent this), but it would bench players of the opposing team, which is hugely unsporting and exceptionally embarrassing toward the benched players.
Ask the opposing coach to order his team quit the field? Again, an insult and therefore unsporting. If the opposing coach wanted to, he could have quit with the agreement of the winning coach, but that was something best initiated by the opposing coach based on his analysis of what he thought would be best for his team. Bearing in mind that the opposition coach’s team had not won a game this season, was near the bottom of the league, and was facing a team near the top of the league, surely the opposition coach had more than enough opportunity to decide well before the game if and when he should leave the field, and chose not to do so. Pressuring the opposing coach to quit would be grossly disrespectful of this decision.
The only bully here is the father of the player on the losing team. It’s a pity that he is teaching his son that playing the victim and publicly protesting is the way to handle a loss of what is just a high school football game.
And let’s not forget that these players are high school students – most of them juniors and seniors. Old enough to drive, old enough to have most jobs, old enough to apprentice, and for many of the seniors, old enough to enlist in the Texas State Guard. It must be stressed that these are not little kids. They are verging on adulthood, and should be learning how to handle both victory and defeat, rather than letting daddy turn them into victims.
There is no shame in playing a game and losing. There is shame in pretending to be a victim.
i went to Western Hills HS myself for a semester back in the mid-90s, and back then their football team was mediocre as well. Not on this level, mind you.
One factor that does not seem to be making the fact check on this story, though. Aledo is a rather wealthy school district. I’m generalizing here, of course, but Aledo is quite a bit more rural than Benbrook, and populated by greater numbers of white collar families liviing on acre-sized homesites, in houses that probably appraise for double or more, compared to similar-sized homes in Benbrook. Aledo is quite a ways outside the city limits - and the students and population are far more fixated on football, culturally. And they’ve got the property taxes to support a high-end football program. It doesn’t surprise me at all to hear that they have a great football team.
Western Hills, OTOH, runs more to the blue-collar these days. It’s nearby the former Carswell AFB which was drastically downsized some years back, and the surrounding areas have suffered quite a bit, financially. Benbrook has certainly seen better days with regards to property taxes and high school graduation rates. The student body size has had some pretty rapid ups and downs, and has fluctuated between being almost too small to be in 4A, too large for 3A. They redrew boundaries a time or two as new high schools were built and bled off segments of their population.
Western Hills has bigger fish to fry than fretting about the underfunded football team. But high school football is not “optional” around here, either, so they field whatever team they can muster. I don’t think anyone was too terribly ashamed about it until this week.
Now, of course, Western Hills makes the national news for having both what sounds like the world’s worst football team AND the world’s most ridiculous helicopter parenting.
