162-2

[Are_grits_groceries]

162-2
This score is obscene for any game. It is especially obscene for a high school girl's basketball game. It so far from the realm of good sportsmanship that it is a sad lesson. It is a lesson in what not to do.

I have played, coached, refereed, and had just about every other job that relates to basketball in 50 years. I played in the dark ages before it was 5 on 5 and beyond. I have seen and played on pitiful teams. I have seen great teams and played on one excellent one in high school. I have never seen a score remotely like this.

Neither team learned much if anything from it. The better team certainly didn't sharpen any skills on this type of 'opposition'. In fact, they may have picked up one bad habits from easily running over and around the other kids. What they were able to do this time won't be so easy the next time.

It is not so easy to dismiss the other team finishing. I don't know about the mindset, but finishing a game may be some kind of victory for them. They didn't quit. That may be a goal. They certainly don't want to be pitied or condescended to. That's makes this tricky under the rules of the league. And yes, some teams do have goals that we know nothing about.

I looked up some information about this league. This is a 1A game which is the lowest division. Each state has their own designations so that matters. This league is located in inland California. One note about this league said that lopsided scores have been occurring more and more. That should be a clue for someone that something is wrong with their classification system. They also don't have a 'mercy rule' and they don't allow a running clock until the fourth quarter. A mercy rule and a running clock agreed to by the refs and both teams would have provided a more merciful end to this game that applies to all teams. One team wouldn't feel singled out.

The winning coach applied a full-court press for the entire first half. Why he kept it up that long is beyond me. He had beaten them to a pulp well before the end of the half. In the second half he did tell his team to run the shot clock down to the last few seconds. He also should have confined them to 3-point shots at the end of that time. That would have given them a real chance to work on a needed skill. Unless the entire team is made up of remarkable shooters, that would have kept the score down.

I know some people were saying it's the other team's job to stop the scoring. Hogwash! If they had players with decent skills that might apply. In this case it was literally impossible for that team to stop anybody. This was like shooting fish in a barrel.

I hope the suspended coach thinks long and hard about how to handle a situation like this. Winning isn't everything and that is a misquote. It was 'Wanting to win is everything.' The second motto is one I agree with. Learning to win gracefully is also a needed value. That can be harder to absorb than learning not to be a sore loser.

I can't find the article but I read one in the past that highlighted a different approach. Two teams were mismatched in skills and in the resources provided to each team. Before they played again, the coaches worked something out that turned the game into a clinic where the better players coached the others one to one. They also brought badly needed equipment to the other team. This was a very tricky situation because nobody wants to feel like they are a charity players who need help. It worked because the players on both teams handled it with great sensitivity. They continued this on other occasions they arranged.

Here is a story about a girls team that does get the brakes beat off of them, but the records and the scores are not the point. It is a special case, but you can see what a team can mean.

'It's Not About The Record’
By JOHN BRANCH
HUNTINGDON, Tenn. — It was early on a Friday morning, and there was an emergency in Carroll Academy’s Room 5. A student named Destiny was sitting alone, crying. With cameras in every classroom, she could be seen on the monitor in the security office.

The girls basketball team at Carroll Academy had lost the night before, 69-9, at home to University School of Jackson, a private college-preparatory school about 45 minutes away.

Destiny, a 17-year-old senior with a crossover dribble, a silky shooting touch and a habit of drug use, was the only one of the nine Carroll Academy players with any previous high school basketball experience. There were games this season when Destiny scored all the team’s points. There were times in every game when her passes, delivered at the velocity of someone playing dodge ball, bounced off teammates’ hands, leaving Destiny in a quiet fit of grimaces and upturned palms.

On the court the previous night, her street-tough persona boiled toward reckless anger. Defended tightly, often by two opponents, she was all elbows and sneers.

Coach Tonya Lutz did not like what she saw and benched Destiny in the second half. Randy Hatch, the school administrator, did not like what he saw, either.

He had a hunch. And he had a tip. He ordered a drug test for Destiny the next morning.

That was why she was crying in Room 5.

“I’m not going to be able to pass my drug screen,” she said when Lutz, Hatch and the school’s security director, Patrick Steele, came into the room. And before she was escorted to the restroom to urinate into a cup, she pressed her face into Lutz’s shoulder and sobbed.

Learning to Be Survivors

Carroll Academy is in Huntingdon, about 100 miles east of Memphis and 100 miles west of Nashville in West Tennessee. It is a strictly run day school with about 80 students operated by the Carroll County Juvenile Court, filled with teenagers trying to work their way back to their home schools with the velvet-hammered guidance of parole officers and people like Lutz, Hatch and Steele.

Among the nine girls on the Carroll Academy basketball team, only one lives with both her mother and her father. A seventh grader, she lived with her parents and two younger siblings at a grandmother’s house, having been evicted from one trailer and waiting to move into another.

A few of the players moved more than once during the season. A couple have lived for weeks or months in abandoned houses without water, electricity or heat. Few of the parents have steady jobs, and at least one is in jail.
<snip>
Much more and it's worth the read:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/sports/carroll-academy-basketball-it-aint-about-the-record.html

[brooklynite]

1. I shouldn't play ice hockey...

Last edited Tue Jan 20, 2015, 07:55 PM - Edit history (1)

...why? Because I can't ice skate. And if I could, I wouldn't be able to maneuver a puck with a stick while skating.

What this story tells me is that the team on the losing side of this game shouldn't be playing basketball, or at least not be in the league it was playing in. Whether or not the students have difficult lives and whether or not their school has the resources to train them, it's evident that the students can't currently master the game and shouldn't be playing it with people who can. They can play intramural basketball or be matched with another school of equally struggling students. But if they -do- end up playing a team where they're fundamentally outmatched, the game shouldn't be called before it gets embarrassing. Why? Because there's no way to pick a number that's not completely arbitrary. 100 pt margin? 50? Other than "we know it when we see it", whats the basis for picking one? And would the Carroll Academy players feel significantly better being outplayed 50-0?

[ret5hd]

30. Your charade is evident to anyone with open eyes.

[brooklynite]

31. Don't be shy: please enlighten every one

[ret5hd]

32. You already have.

[joeglow3]

42. Thanks for continuing absolutely nothing beyond a cry for attention.

[madokie]

2. My youngest son

has the local high school record in basketball. He had 45 points against a team who only had 42 points total. I can't remember what the points of our team was but I know that Luke made more than enough to have beat the opposing team all by himself. The school retired his number and have a big ass banner in the gymnasium proclaiming him as the schools all time points leader with his jersey hanging beside it.
My grand baby, his daughter, is playing now and is showing the same talent as her dad.

To say we're proud parents would be an understatement.

I say that playing sports is good for the development of a person

[Are_grits_groceries]

21. Sports does help develop kids.

I am not suggesting that someone like your son is in the wrong. I don't know the score of that game, but the other team was apparently not entirely helpless if they scored 46. There are games that are blowouts. This year Kentucky beat Kansas 72-40 and UCLA 82-49. Those are not scrub programs.

I'll bet there were many games in which your son had to really work hard to score. He has a talent and maximized it. Good for him.

162-2 is a whole other story than a blowout of a great team over a bad team or a good team having a bad night.

[Brickbat]

3. Small schools especially face lopsided scores all the time.

The story about Carroll Academy is certainly compelling. But I don't know its team wants others to go easy on them:

“If I looked out and I could see in their eyes that they’re depressed about losing, and hated to come out here, it wouldn’t be worth it,” said Hatch, a 54-year-old lifelong resident of Huntingdon who long served as Carroll Academy’s boys and girls basketball coach, as he watched a game from the stands. “But they put it behind them quicker than anybody.”

Kids often do.

[Are_grits_groceries]

22. Nobody wants pity.

That's why mercy rules and a running clock helps. They apply to all teams and everyone knows what happens. That still provides for a game but one that is limited in time in certain situations.

[Brickbat]

24. Michael Anderson said he asked for running time in the third quarter.

It was denied, but granted in the fourth quarter, per state high school league rules.

[TheCowsCameHome]

4. If that was electoral votes against the republicans

in 2016, I'd be lovin' it.

[DrDan]

5. that they used a full-court press the entire first half - leading 104-1 at halftime - is disgusting

I hope the principal or other administrator explains that to that coach - he obviously is not aware himself.

However, this is not unlike our increasing class-inequality - 1% owning half the wealth. Perhaps this is how the greedy wealthy learn their lessons.

[ProfessorGAC]

6. The Refs Should Have Called The Game

Maybe they don't have that latitude in that state, but i would have done it and taken my chances with the association.

While someone here noted that the losing team doesn't belong in this league perhaps, the schedule is the schedule for this year. That's water under the bridge.

There is no excuse for running up a score like this in a high school game. In the pros, EVERYONE is supposed to be good enough to stop the other team from administering that sort of beating. Not so at the HS level. And, in the pros, the team getting beaten down gets their paychecks anyway.

There is NO excuse for not just taking the air out of the ball, playing half court all the time, on D too, and just let the clock run until the game was over.

That is, of course, if the refs didn't stop the game.

There are wipeout rules even in rec league softball for adults. There is no reason why there shouldn't be for this situation too.

[brooklynite]

8. Losing builds character...as does solidering through when things aren't going well...

...would the losing team feel better because the ref showed pity on them?

[ProfessorGAC]

9. Patronizing Nonsense

That's not losing. Losing is trying your best but not winning, while still being respectable, even in a big loss.

This doesn't build character. It would be like you fighting Tyson at his prime, getting knocked into next week, and then expecting to be a better person.

[brooklynite]

10. Then, define an acceptable loss that's not based on a completely arbitrary measure

[frylock]

11. bullshit question. you don't even have to put a number on it..

a coach with a modicum of class wouldn't have had his defense pressing full court with a score like that. a coach with class would've had his team work the clock while on offense. your attitude plays right into the right-wing bullshit meme that we're a society of p*****s.

[brooklynite]

12. Okay, they play easy and the score is 100 - 22...

You'd all still be here complaining.

The simple answer, as I said before, is not to match your team with one that's completely out of your league, and if you are not capable of playing on par with others, limit your activities to intramural.

[frylock]

13. you clearly know fuckall about the game

[brooklynite]

15. Temper, temper...

[snooper2]

29. I know that the net is too fucking low...

Every year the players on average get taller and taller...

But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO they never raise the fucking net. In a couple years they won't even have to do that half ass step jump. Just walk up to the basket and drop it in

[NM_Birder]

17. losing is quitting. These girls didn't quit, that makes them winners.

even if everybody who thinks teams should only be allowed to win by a respectful margin, is outraged by thier humliation. These girls lose every game, and by substantial amounts, yet they still show up and play AS A TEAM. that makes them winners, regardless how hard others try to bring them down.

Good on them, sad on the bell ringers.

[seabeyond]

7. swimming, we went up against a team that was not good. our coach put us all in races we never swam,

that were not our races, just to tone down the win.

we were highly competitive. and then there is sportsmanship.

[brer cat]

33. A good way to handle the situation.

Sportsmanship goes a long way in life.

[Capt. Obvious]

14. The Arroyo Valley High girls basketball teams needs run laps

They didn't pitch a shut out.

"The game just got away from me," Anderson told the San Bernardino Sun on Friday. "I didn't play any starters in the second half. I didn't expect them to be that bad. I'm not trying to embarrass anybody."

He says if he had it to do again, he'd have played only reserves after the first quarter, or, "I wouldn't play the game at all."

But Bloomington coach Dale Chung says Arroyo Valley used a full-court press for the entire first half to lead 104-1 at halftime.

ESPN

[Are_grits_groceries]

19. No.

The coach needs to run laps. Asking kids to defy their coach is a little much. He set the parameters for them.

[Capt. Obvious]

20. We do not train to be merciful here.

Mercy is for the weak.

Here, in the streets, in competition: A team confronts you, they are the enemy. An enemy deserves no mercy.

[Are_grits_groceries]

23. They aren't in the streets.

It isn't war by any measure. They are the opposition to be beaten not the enemy to be killed.

[dumbcat]

28. I wasn't aware anyone was killed

It's called competition. There are winners and losers. Mercy is for priests.

[SwankyXomb]

26. Sweep the leg, Johnny!

[Capt. Obvious]

27. Second place is no place

You're off the team.

[NM_Birder]

16. If the girls played the game through to the end,

even while being pasted with a score like that,......then the lesson they need to know is sinking in. regardless the odds, DO.NOT.QUIT.

Don't quit on yourself, don't quit on your teammates. Don't blame the ref, and don't blame the other team superior skill, work as hard as you can, stick together, play your game and don't quit.

Rely on yourself, don't depend on someone else changing the rules for you, give it all you got regardless the score. High school basketball will be irrelevant in short order, but sticking together and not quitting is the lesson here, not "but someone should have stopped the game to keep the losing team's self esteem in place".

There are winners, losers,... and fighters. Fighters may lose a game but are always winners, losers who quit don't understand the team mentality and quitting will always be the option out. these girls are fighters that may not win the games, but in the home lives the article describes, sticking together regardless the odds makes them winners.

If you played ball, then you know it's not just about the score, they lost every game they played, ..... but they still show up and played as a team. THAT is what high school athletics is about, surprised you don't see that with 50 years experience.

[Are_grits_groceries]

18. I pointed out that the inferior team should not be patronized nor

condescended to. I said they might have pride in not quitting. That said it is horse hockey to play a game with this score without some adjustments. There needs to be a mercy rule and running clock for the entire district when games get this out of hand. That way one team is not singled out.

They can learn not quitting with those measures in place. NOBODY learns any real basketball with a score like this. In addition, not every team will see that not quitting is a goal when getting beaten to a pulp. They might learn how to lose and give up no matter what a coach does.

High school basketball is about more than the score as you said. It is also about sportsmanship and learning about what winning really means. Everybody loses with a score of 162-2.

You know who has a mercy rule? Little League does. They recognize that a complete rout is in nobody's best interest.

[NM_Birder]

36. I commend the girls for showing up to any games at all.

Faced with being badly beaten every game they show more guts by showing up than most any winning team. Yes I am aware little league has a mercy rule, I am also aware that even professional sports have the option to employ the mercy rule.

Personally I am more impressed and proud of someone who takes defeat, even horrendous defeat, and keeps heads up and keeps fighting back. People and most especially determined team mates don't appreciate a white knight coming to the rescue, or shielding them with a mercy rule, or "slaughter out" .......... a terrible beating with a determined team is better than a third party taking the drive away and telling them they are losing too badly for anybody to want to watch, and they can't continue.

The story linked to the 162-2 score reveals a group of girls that have the odds stacked against them in social and economic ways, yet they show up as a team and try thier hardest, knowing there is little chance of success. The mercy rule isn't a good lesson in my opinion, and again ....just my opinion, if the girls thought the mercy rule was appropriate, they would have started quitting games long ago. My greatest achievements did not come about with someone else deciding I was not capable of continuing, they came from me not giving up.

Good on them.

[dumbcat]

25. I don't understand why t he refs didn't just

adjust the score of the losing team up to 161 so then they would have lost by only one point and all this hullabaloo could have been avoided.

In fact, why not have the refs do that for every game? At the end of the game give the losing team enough points to only lose by one point. How could anyone disagree with that?

[Are_grits_groceries]

34. Possibly the dumbest post ever or at least in the running. nt

[dumbcat]

35. What? Why? Do you want losers to feel bad?

That's cruel. Just think, if the final score of every game was adjusted to a single point win, then the poor losing team could always say, "Well, we almost won."

Why would you want the losers to suffer needless emotional distress?

[NM_Birder]

38. Greatest username ever. Spot on.

[dumbcat]

40. You believe personal insults are

a substitute for debate? Do you have anything to actually say? C'mon, I'm looking for some solutions here. Everyone is so upset that the score was so different. How would you fix it?

[NM_Birder]

43. Nothing to fix,

other than your inability to understand what sports, competition and the feeling of winning something is all about. Spoon feeding self respect to people would probably make you feel better, make you feel like you are "fixing" things. I cannot imagine what kind of person would appreciate having someone like you be so condescending, and so patronizing as to want to manipulate a score, not to encourage the loser, but to self gratify themselves into believing others "NEED" that type of false, shallow lie. You advocate using the loser, in order to make yourself feel better about your failures.

Essentially, "we know you tried your best, but you are still just too embarrassing for the rest of us to feel comfortable about, so we are going to change the score to make us feel less uncomfortable about your insufficiency". That is some Quantum Sarcastic Shit you are advocating, there.

Others respect an honest competitive attitude, but that is the difference between your opinion and mine. I don't need someone to lie to me in order to make me feel good about myself.

Good luck with your "solution", you will struggle with it until you come to grips with what it really is.
Feel Better with this response ?

[NM_Birder]

37. I had to read that post again just to be sure it wasn't sarcastic humor.

The reply cemented the stupidity and ignorance.

[dumbcat]

41. <sigh> I guess it isn't going to work

If I had used the sarcasm tag it would have defeated the whole purpose. I was trying to get some of the handwringers to say what a stupid idea it would be to give the refs (any refs) any such power. (Or maybe even say what a great idea it was. ) But all I got was you two guys who just threw personal insults rather than say what a stupid idea it was and why. So I went back with a little more absurd justification trying to get anyone to criticize the idea. Still didn't work. Oh well.

Nothing against you two guys, but you were the only ones to respond. I guess I should have learned in my relatively short time here that subtlety is not very effective here. I'll try to do better.

[KamaAina]

39. Oh, c'mon, grits. It was only 161-2.

Last edited Wed Jan 21, 2015, 03:23 PM - Edit history (1)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/120450955