Why are so many people making a big deal about a high school girls basketball being beat 100 to nothing? Why? What's even worse is that the team that won, their coach was fired for saying that they weren't sorry. Why should he/she (I'm not sure) be sorry for his team winning? One thing that professional and most college sports teams know is that there is no trophy for coming in last place. Did the Cowboys get a trophy for not making the playoffs and coming in third in the division? No, they didn't. I don't know why we, as a society, have to pamper the feelings of our youth. I didn't win every championship in Tee-Ball, but I was handed a trophy that was little and was called the loser's trophy. In fact, getting that trophy was the worst thing you could get because that meant that you DIDN'T WIN!
That coach shouldn't have fired. The team that won shouldn't have to forfeit. That team was prepared, they executed and they won. They beat the pulp out of a team that obviously didn't care enough to give a little bit more effort to score just ONE goal. Not ONE! Stop coddling our youth, especially high school aged youth, and treat them like the adults that we want them to grow into. Because when they get into the real world, they are in for a very rude awakening.
Episode 153: Hot As Balls
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Episode 153: Hot As Balls – In the post-E3 show, we recap one of the most
boring E3’s in the history of MAHG. We then talk about the wonderful
Wonder Woma...
8 years ago
I hadn't heard of this story before you mentioned it, but it wasn't hard to find. (I don't watch a lot of TV, and most of my news feeds are either gaming or politics.)
ReplyDeleteHuh. It seems like the losing team was already at a disadvantage going into it (bold added):
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Dallas Academy has eight girls on its varsity team and about 20 girls in its high school. It is winless over the last four seasons. The academy boasts of its small class sizes and specializes in teaching students struggling with "learning differences," such as short attention spans or dyslexia.
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So the losing school doesn't have a lot of girls to pick from, and they may be struggling with learning challenges that might make it harder for them to play in the first place to boot.
Except, as I was posting this, I researched a bit further and found a comment on the Dallas News site (again, bold added):
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Sad part of it is the lack of information in the original story.
#1 As reported by TAPPS Dallas Academy has an average enrollment of 94 over the last 2 years. The Covenant School has an average of 59, which makes them the smaller of the 2 schools! Also just so everyone knows Covenant only has 8 girls on its team as well!
#2 Both schools are TAPPS Class 2A in District 3 which makes them District foes, so they meet twice a year.
#3 The paper says that Dallas Academy is known for teaching special needs children, none of which play on the basketball team. So really how pertinent is that information other than for sensational reasons?
#4 In Covenants coach’s first season the team went 2 - 19 and were beaten 82-6 in a game. But didn’t cry about it, or get the media attention that Dallas Academy got BUT instead worked hard to make it to the final 4 two years later!
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I think the Covenant coach could've had his girls go a little easier (it's easy to say that just by looking at the final score), but what did they expect them to do, hand the other team the ball and just stand around the court for 40 minutes?
What were the rest of the game stats? How many shots did each team attempt? Rebounds? Blocks? There are a lot of anecdotal quotes that say Covenant didn't ease up, but there are also quotes that say neither did Dallas, even praising them to holding Covenant down to 12 points in the final quarter.
I was at Duke University for the 1991-92 season, the year the Blue Devils went 34-2 to win a second consecutive national championship. (Man, that was a good year. :D) There were games where they'd would pull ahead by large margins. What happened then? Starters would get pulled, and second string players would come in.
Looking at comments on this game, there's a lot of criticism for the coach not doing the same thing. If the commenter is accurate about Covenant's roster (indeed, I just checked their web site, and they do list only eight players for girls varsity basketball), how the heck do you pull your starting line-up of 5 when you only have 3 left on the bench?
Commenters are also calling foul about Covenant maintaining a full-court press for the entire game and taking three-point shots in the fourth quarter. I take these comments with a great deal of skepticism. For one thing, a 3-point shot is a low-percentage shot. You generally only attempt those when you're either absolutely certain of success, you have no other choice, or you have nothing to lose. This could mean Dallas was stepping up their defense and keeping Covenant out of the inside, forcing Covenant to take a three or turn it over on time. Or, it could be that Covenant was slowing things down and running out the clock, keeping the ball outside and throwing the ball at the hoop when time required. This happened with Duke as well — when they had a large lead, they'd start taking threes. They'd miss a lot, but it didn't matter. Either way, the comments make it sound like they were draining threes the whole quarter, and to have only 12 points, that's only 4 threes at most.
As for the full-court press, that takes a lot of energy to maintain, no matter how many points you're up by; and with a lack of a bench to supply fresh blood to maintain it, I don't buy that Covenant was able to maintain a full-court press for an entire game. I'm extremely skeptical of those comments.
And what have the Covenant (and Dallas) players learned in all of this? If you win big, you lose, because someone will come and take it away from you. The coach is fired, and the Covenant administration has apologized and forfeit the win on behalf of the team for their "embarrassment".
The coach's and players' responses are really telling.
I saw this story on ESPN the day after the game. Big story about it., as it was on Mike & Mike, SportsCenter & 1st Take.
ReplyDeleteNow, Cyber is showing these different accounts, but what I took from all the stories that I saw that day, was that it was not a matter of beating the Dallas team, but the fact that they were being "encouraged" to play for the 100 score.
90-0, and I think nobody cares. It was the fact that they scored 100, and then left it there that kind of sours me.
Now, I am one for winners and losers. I think "all get a ribbon" is garbage, but I do have a problem if they were looking to run the score to 100, just for the sake of running the score.
On a side note, do we really have separate schools for kids with ADD, and such? Man, we would have all be in those separate schools if they diaganosed us back in the ealry 70s.