I go back and forth on this one. As you might have heard, recently two
Texas girls' basketball teams played to a score of 100 to 0. That
score obviously represents a butt-kicking of almost mythic proportions
and an apology ensued. The coach on the winning team was fired.
My first, immediate reaction was that Coventry had run up the score.
Later, however, I started to think. Who scheduled this game?
Obviously, the winning team was much better. It could not have been a secret. The athletic director of the losing school had to have seen a loss coming. I have seen a few basketball blow outs. During the 1992 Olympics, the Dream Team was the first American Olympic team using pros. They slaughtered the other teams. It was a wonder to behold. It was the Olympics. That was what they were there for. They beat one team by 79 points. (That game was every bit as close as the score would tend to indicate.)
The Bulls once beat the the Jazz by 42 points in a finals game. The Jazz complained the Bulls were running the score up and taking three pointers and playing hard defense. No ofense, but they had their last five players on the floor and had been litening all week to people talking about how the jazz bench was better, and they had the last quarter of the game to play those guys at hoops. John Stockton was asked after the game how he felt about Stacy King making a three point shot in that game. His response? "If you don't want them to take three pointers, guard them."
On the other hand, those were pro players taking on players of similar calber. The international Olympic Committee had been pressuring America to end pros for years. They thought it would improve the international level of competition. And it did. Some of the best NBA players are international stars.
A high school game is slightly different. These kids aren't trying to improve. There is obviously no slaughter rule, but the fact that slaughter rules do exist says to me that our concept of sportsmanship -- as a society -- does not include winning a high school girls basketball game by 100 points. On the other hand, someone at the losing school decided to schedule the other team.
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So the coach on the winning team was actually fired for publicly criticizing his school for issuing the apology and for not apologizing himself. He claims that he was not running the score up and "only pressed until the score was 20 to nothing," although one wonders why he was pressing at all -- it's not exactly a secret that the other team is a viable basketball team in name only.
If I were the coach of either, my big beef would be with the game being scheduled at all in the first place. But then, if everyone took that position, the not-very-good (to put it mildly) school might end up with like three games out of conference, and that's no good either.
As the obviously and vastly superior team, I wouldn't like the idea of not playing the game the way we practice it (which, I guess, explains why he started the game pressing). OTOH, I don't want to coach how we normally play and end up beating a significantly weaker opponent 100 to 0. It's a can't-win situation, the Kobayashi Maru of high school basketball coaching conundrums.
I don't really know what the right answer to this one is, either.
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