Posted on 01/26/2009 6:36:58 AM PST by TornadoAlley3
Something tells me the inventor of basketball planned neither on 100-0 winners nor 100-point-loser celebrities.
I just threw up in my Raisin Bran.
Now, where'd I ... put ... my ... ah, there it is ... soap box.
America has gone softer than Bob Dole without his Viagra and it makes me sick. In short, on ABC's Good Morning America Robin Roberts and Diane Sawyer are taking a team of local high school girls basketball players and putting them on a national pedastal as heroes that deserve "praise for their poise and grace against an overwhelming opponent."
So what did the girls from Dallas Academy do to earn this prestigious recognition? They lost a game.
100-0.
Short version: Dallas Academy, a private school near White Rock Lake whose students have "learning differences" and which hasn't won a game in four years, lost to Covenant School, a North Dallas Christian school, on Jan. 13 by the God-awful score of A-Century-to-Zippo.
The result is inexcusable. Despicable. As he should have been, Covenant head coach Micah Grimes has been fired. He not only ran up the score, then had the audacity to stand by his lack of sportsmanship even as the school issued an apology.
Clearly, Grimes' team was superior. That point got hammered home at what, 30-0? 50-0? 88-0? As a coach there are ways - not shooting until after 20 passes, for example - to work on your team's game without necessarily scoring.
But, at the risk of being politically incorrect and insensitive, the coach/leadership at Dallas Academy deserves just as much of the blame. Why?
For agreeing to allow the team to be further humiliated on national TV.
Shame on the Today Show and GMA for exploiting these girls amidst a sappy, milk-toasty puddle of over-exaggerated sympathy. For its grand "achievement", Dallas Academy has appeared on GMA twice, CBS' Early Show, the Today Show and a visit to Ellen is likely. Even more shame on Dallas Academy for accepting the whirlwind media tour on the heels of a horrible loss.
There are real heroes all around us, right Sully Sullenberger? Why, as Americans, do we fall into this trap of affording celebrity to those who have done nothing other than embarrass themselves?
I was in Portland in 2003 for a Mavericks' playoff game in which a 13-year-old girl forgot the words to the National Anthem and melted into a tearful mess before Blazers coach Maurice Cheeks "heroically" helped her get through it. In the same series, a 10-year-old boy sang the anthem flawlessly at American Airlines Center. Guess which kid became a national celebrity, appearing on Jay Leno?
Does William Hung ring a bell?
And there are millions in this country who saved and sacrificed and took a third job in order to pay their mortgage on time. But it's the others - who simply gave up and lost to their banks by the equivalent of 100-0 - whom the government decided to bail out.
It's a troubling trend to say the least. We're in the midst of raising the softest generation of children in the history of America.
Our kids play video games, and if they "lose" - a man or a game or a car or whatever - they either consult their "cheat codes" or simply hit "new game" and presto, failure avoided. Same with our sports. No matter their level of enthusiasm or committment or development or performance, kids in our youth leagues are receiving Participation Plaques.
Just like the girls from Dallas Academy, we're rewarding our youth with a false sense of accomplishment.
Valuable lessons can be learned from losing, but not if they're sugar-coated with Participation Plaques or appearances on national television.
Grimes should be on GMA right now so the hosts can spew venom at him for his inexplicable lack of sportsmanship. But having the girls on sends a horrible and dangerous message. Lose by 40, go home and get better. Lose by 100, go on TV and be a star!
I imagine a similar team with similar "learning differences" and similar talent sitting at home, wondering WTF? If they practiced harder and learned more and got better and lost their game only, say, 74-8, why are they watching another team get honored on TV?
It's disgusting, really.
What I'd like to read about is that the team that lost 100-0 used it as motivation. They practiced. They learned. They improved. And the next time Dallas Academy played Covenant they lost only 88-6. Now that's a heroic story of persistance and pride worth glorifying.
But we're not ever going to hear it. Why? Because Dallas Academy canceled it's game this Friday against Covenant. In fact, its headmaster said - I kid you not - "the hell with it" and threw in the towel on the whole season.
The moral to the story: Lose by 100. Quit. Become a celebrity.
Maybe Grimes let his team run the score up in protest against having to play a team that had no business being on the court.
I’m am sure I am not the only one with this kind of story:
When I was in JR high, our basketball team was horrible.We would lose by 50 or 60 points easily. After each lost,our coach would have us practice full court defensive drills and run wind sprints until our lungs exploded.Furthermore, our parents NEVER took pity on us and always expected us to improve.
We lost every game my first year of JR high and the first several of my second year. Eventually, we became competetive and the other teams no longer regarded us as pushovers. When we finally won our only game of the year, we celebrated like rock stars.
I need to preface this with the fact that I tell my players that there is a reason that the first place trophy is bigger - you WON, they lost.
The problems I had with this story are:
1. Those two teams should have never been in the same conference PERIOD.
2. The winning coach waited waaaaaay to long to yank his starters. Should have been done when he noticed that the score was 30 - 0 and the other team didn’t stand a chance. He pulled them at 88-0.
I help coach a HS football team with the same problem - we are in a weak conference and literally crush our competition - in the neiborhood of 56 to 6 or better. We play a lot of schools that only have 900 students where we have 1775. We pull our starters after 28 points if the other team has not scored. We do this so all of our players get some clock not to run up the score, but those second and third stringers are pretty darn good.
I have tried to push the head coach into a tougher schedule at the beginning of the season to no avail - we always get bumped out to the playoffs when we face real competition, since we played a level down all season. He is too worried about preserving his record. We have a really screwed up system here where your last three game of the season MUST be against a conf. opponent and if you win all 3 of those games you get into the playoffs with a 3-7 record. I am about preparing these kids to a college program where they not going to go 10-0 during the regular season. I have had one kid quit his college team because they went 0-10 and had a coach who was a yeller. It doens’t help these kids who only lose 4 games their entire high school career. They take winning as a easy task that require little or no work on their part.
I predict that Coach Grimes will quickly find another job.
I agree with you about waiting until the score was 88-0 to pull starters though, but I still get the feeling he was trying to make a point.
I was surprised to hear so many people on the local radio show supporting this firing. One dissenting voice compared it to a track meet....you wouldn’t encourage a runner to slow down if he (or she) was winning by a mile. As long as these girls were good sports in this game, they should be congratulated.
Football coaches in CT face a one game suspension if their team wins by 50 points or more. So, a team playing in the semi-finals prior to the state Super Bowl could be losing 48-0 with ten seconds to go and take a knee in their own endzone. Enjoy your weekend sucker. Speakinmg of victim b-ball. Who won the NCAA Women’s championship over Rutgers?
The guy deserved to be fired; whether the other team should have been on the court with his team, or not. He made ZERO attempt at sportsmanship, and set a TERRIBLE example for the kids. Even if he was motivated from a standpoint that he was opposed to the playing the team, he did it COMPLETELY wrong. The guy is not the type of coach that needs to be molding young minds and spirits.
With that said, I would have fired the losing coach, for allowing his team to suffer that type of humiliation, and I would fire the school admins that allowed the national press to turn this into a pity fest for the kids. If I was a parent at that school, my kids, would have been yanked so fast, it would have made the hall monitor's heads spin.
My oldest plays select and HS soccer. She and her teammates hate that scoring rule. At the HS they stop adding after a 5 point difference. However on the select team the coach requires the girls to shoot from outside the box and make at least 5 or 6 passes. The girls perfer the later.
The man is rationalizing running 100 points up on a team, and from his comments, I wonder if he would be embarrassed by losing in such a manner; even though he says the other team shouldn’t be.
I still think firing him was the right thing to do. As a youth coach, my kids wouldn’t play for him.
I hope not with high school kids until he gains a little more maturity and perspective about coaching at that level. He did fulfill the immediate task of a coach that day-winning the game. But I believe he failed at task two which was to develop his team basketball-wise while winning. After a while a team does not learn anything defensively from watching one or two players take the the ball away from a shaky ball handler time after time. Offensively, the coach also missed a rare opportunity to practice ball control offense and late game situations which would have kept the score down. The coach also failed in his third task, the most important task in the long term, promoting sportsmanship.
It seems that both coaches needed to discuss the likely outcome before the game and talk about what to do if the game got out of hand early. A situation like that demanded cooperation and communication from both sides and we don't know if the losing coach did his part either.
It is now clear to me that the successful basketball shooting by the Covenant School girls was grossly disproportionate to the unsuccessful shooting by the Dallas Academy girls. Coach Grimes should probably be brought before the International Court of Justice in the Hague, and tried for his brutal crimes against the psychological well being of the Dallas Academy players.
Or else perhaps Dallas Academy should hire the now unemployed but talented coach, and then in a year or two they may win a lopsided victory over Covenant school.
Yeah, we do. The winning team didn't pull their starters until the 4th quarter. According to what the winning coach wrote, the scores per period were something like ; 1st-30+, 2nd-20+, 3rd-30+,4th-12. The losing coach should have said something to the refs and other coach; early in the game, when it was apparent what was happening. When the other coach didn't take actions to slow his team down, he should have forfeited the game and walked off the court and filed a complaint with the state HS Athletics Commission, or whatever they call it in their state.
I am all for blow outs; having been on the receiving and giving ends, as both a player and a coach. It's part of the game, and CAN teach a valuable lesson to players, parents and coaches. 100-0 is beyond the pale, though, and totally unacceptable, IMO.
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