Texas girls hoops team seeks forfeit of 100-0 win

[Adsos Letter]

By JEFF CARLTON
Associated Press Writer

DALLAS (AP) -- A Texas high school girls basketball team on the winning end of a 100-0 game has a case of blowout remorse. Now officials from The Covenant School say they are trying to do the right thing by seeking a forfeit and apologizing for the margin of victory.

"It is shameful and an embarrassment that this happened," Kyle Queal, the head of the school, said in a statement, adding the forfeit was requested because "a victory without honor is a great loss."

The private Christian school defeated Dallas Academy last week. Covenant was up 59-0 at halftime.

A parent who attended the game told The Associated Press that Covenant continued to make 3-pointers - even in the fourth quarter. She praised the Covenant players but said spectators and an assistant coach were cheering wildly as their team edged closer to 100 points.

"I think the bad judgment was in the full-court press and the 3-point shots," said Renee Peloza, whose daughter plays for Dallas Academy. "At some point, they should have backed off."

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/O/ODD_HUNDRED_POINT_SHUTOUT?SITE=KING&SECTION=MIDWEST&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2009-01-22-21-24-34

[bluestateguy]

1. They have this backwards: the losing team should have forfeited at halftime

That would have saved them further embarrassment. It's not the winning team's fault that the losing team sucks.

[Pithlet]

3. Yeah, because there's no value

in trying your hardest and never giving up.

[hfojvt]

44. by Grabthar's hammer, by the suns of warvan

they will be avenged!

At some point, you'd have to consider it a victory just to score.

[Idealism]

2. If they were pressing the entire game, I could understand the anger

You can't fault a team for making shots, especially jump shots. They could be pounding it down your throat, so to speak, with lay ups instead, but they choose to shoot tougher attempts. The full court press is another matter, and is highly rude when blowing a team out.

[ColbertWatcher]

31. No kidding, did they play anyone off the bench?

What is the record for both teams for the season?

What do the players have to say?

[Drunken Irishman]

4. Pfft. Why play the game at all? Just draw straws if people don't want to get "embarrassed".

[Greyhound]

9. Me thinks you missed the point. n/t

[Drunken Irishman]

20. The point seems like their basketball team sucked.

I mean, seriously, they couldn't score a freaking point?

What's embarrassing is their performance, not the other team doing their job.

[Greyhound]

36. The concept of sportsmanship is lost or forgotten to you?

Rolling up the score on an overmatched opponent is bad form and shameful, not "doing your job".

The losing team's coach should have forfeited, but he other teams performance was a disgrace.

[Two Americas]

42. they are kids

Bad enough that winning is everything in the adult world. Playing high school athletics is not "doing a job."

I played on a badly over matched team in college, and we took many poundings, and even set NCAA records that are better forgotten. We always showed up, always played hard, always played fair, always held our heads high and gave it all we had. When another team got way ahead of us, they substituted and let up. Of course. And after the game, they looked us in the eye, shook hands, and praised us for never giving up.

In high school, I was on a team that won state championships. We never gloated over nor buried a weaker opponent, never sought to embarrass or humiliate them.

I still have the letters I earned from both teams. That college letter means a lot more, because it was so much more difficult to earn and required so much more character and fortitude. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything. Learning to do the right thing, to do what you committed to do, to show up when the odds are all against you, when the crowd will not be cheering, to stand tall and give your all even when things are going very badly and nothing is coming easily, is something that many people would do well to learn.

Your attitude reflects a poor sense of sportsmanship, and without sportsmanship there is no sports.

[MichaelHarris]

5. Well I

had Dallas Academy +99 so it sucked for me. Bookie told me it was a sure thing.

[DefenseLawyer]

25. Ha!

Dallas Academy was obviously shaving. The Fix was in!

[MichaelHarris]

29. hahahaahah

never thought of that, man they took a dive for sure!

[Pithlet]

6. Good for this school.

Quite a remarkable story, really.

[Hippo_Tron]

7. I'd say it's only a dick move if they didn't put the second string in after halftime

[MichaelHarris]

8. maybe even

the Glee Club at half.

[Hippo_Tron]

11. I say that as a frequent benchwarmer during middle school soccer

Us second stringers should get our playing time as well.

[Two Americas]

47. didn't have a second string

I don't think the school is big enough to do much if any substitution, but they certainly could have eased up on the full court press and the all out 3 point shooting gallery offense.

[BlooInBloo]

10. The "everyone has to be a winner" requirement is one of the great stupidities of our time...

Anyone with any pride would regard the pity as worse than the loss itself.

What's the fucking point of fucking keeping score?

[Pithlet]

16. The point isn't that they won.

It's that they realized they were playing a team that wasn't even on their level of competition, and they used that opportunity to completely humiliate them by making repeated 3 point shots and full court press, and completely and utterly blow them out 100-0 That wasn't a defeat. That was a humiliation. That isn't about everyone has to be a winner. That is about having a modicum of sportsmanship. About knowing that when your opponent is nowhere near your level of skill, that it it's okay to scale it back and not completely rout them in your defeat. In other words, it would have been okay for them to win. It wasn't okay for them to make a spectacle out of it. They knew they were good. They knew they were the better team. Everyone else knew it, too. There was no need for that.

But, it doesn't matter if a bunch of people on a message board don't get it. Sadly, I'm not surprised anymore. The school got it, they're suitably embarrassed and ashamed by what they did and they're doing the right thing. That's all that really matters.

[fishwax]

24. yeah, the pity is worse

Besides, this gesture just calls extra attention to the humiliation and makes their massive defeat an even bigger story.

(This doesn't change the fact that a full-court press when you're ahead by triple digits is generally bad form, though :rofl:)

[BlooInBloo]

27. Yup, to all.

[Two Americas]

49. that is the right wing point of view

What is wrong with everyone winning? Is having the highest score the only way that people can "win?"

Your view of this is precisely analogous to the right wing point of view about economics and society. As Democrats, we think that the game is more important than who "wins."

We keep score because that makes the game more interesting. When winning becomes everything, the game is no longer serving us. That is true in athletics, and it is true in life.

Mercy is not pity.

Pride goes before the fall.

[flvegan]

12. I am SO not touching this one.

Just sit here with my :popcorn:

[Book Lover]

13. Christian schools promoting christian humility?

You mean winning isn't the only thing? I am sorry that I am so (pleasantly) surprised.

[Spike89]

14. Something between compete and slaughter

As a sport fan and competitor on both sides of the blowout issue, I get that it is all about competing. The only thing worse than losing in a blowout is having the other side "give" you something. On the other hand, there is no honor in piling on. In either case, the net result is humiliating the opponent. Play your bench, even let them play their hardest, but don't seek to run up the score. Call off the press, have your team take time off the clock, and certainly don't let your coaches celebrate like that. Blowouts happen, but humiliation has no place in sports.

[Marr]

15. Haha. god-- I think the forfeit is even more in insulting than the 100-0 win.

Best to just move on. Perhaps the winning team's coach could've called the other coach and apologized for the crowd's cheering, but this just seems like adding insult to injury.

[BlooInBloo]

19. It is. Anyone with a shred of pride would realize this.

[gratuitous]

17. My dad coached basketball many years ago

His team and another team in the league were always the top two teams. Dad's team usually finished second, but they won the league a couple of times. One year, another one of the schools in the league had all its upper class players quit over a dispute with the coach. The school was left with a team that had one junior, one sophomore and the rest freshman, who got a special release to play varsity. They soldiered on through the schedule, but it was pretty hopeless, everyone taking their shots at them.

Archrival High played these chumps one week, and blew them out something like 85-12. Talk of the league all weekend. On Monday, Dad came into practice and his team was talking about how they were going to score a hundred, an unheard-of total in those days. Lots of big talk about who was going to get 20 points, 30 points, or more. Dad ran them through practice, then announced that he was making a lineup change for the game against the chumps. He started a second-string senior, a second-string junior, and the rest sophomores.

They played the game, and Dad's team was never in danger, winning 45-20 or something. The coach of the chumps came over and thanked Dad for what he'd done. Dad claimed he didn't know what he was talking about.

Three years later, the league chumps had played together for four years, and had a team unity and cohesiveness that coaches dream of. They went around the league paying the rest of the schools back, but called off the dogs when they played Dad's team.

There's such a thing as sportsmanship, and if you're not playing for money and the champeenship of the world, it should be a team's and a coach's highest ideal. Sounds like Covenant forgot that in the excitement of the game, but recovered their senses afterwards. Good for them.

[ColbertWatcher]

33. Excellent point. n/t

[Libertyfirst]

45. Your Dad is a great man. Shake his hand for me nest time you see him and

thanks for sharing the story.

[RoyGBiv]

18. Even in the fourth quarter ...

So, in other words, all the way up to the end of the game they were making the lowest percentage shot they could legitimately make and were *still* making them. Well, damn ... how dare they actually continue to play. I suppose they should have driven the lane on every possession and made it a game where an apparently atrocious defense could end up with players hurt.

Sheesh ...

Coaches wildly cheering, if that is accurate, when you're up that much is over the top. But then I don't know the context. When I was in high school, basketball was our sport since we had no football, and one year we thoroughly trounced our cross-town rivals (and a much larger school) by something like forty points, and I don't remember our cheering getting any lower as the lead increased. The previous season we'd been thrown out of the playoffs after a heartbreaking, last-second shot.

[DefenseLawyer]

22. Beating your rival by 40

and putting up a 100 on a team that can't even score a SINGLE POINT, is not the same thing. Especially if you are still pressing and shooting 3's. I think the forfeit is a hollow gesture, but it was clearly a dick move.

[RoyGBiv]

30. The press, maybe ...

But then maybe they had a team that always does the press and were angling for a championship somewhere down the line, and the coaches didn't want to break their rhythm.

I've seen the other end of this too where the team that's blowing out the other one basically stops playing. That, too, is viewed by some as an insult.

Truly this isn't a big issue for me either way in the context of sports. If you're going to play sports, you're going to have some really bad crap happen to you at some point because you're not as good as someone you face, and if you can't take it or learn from it, you shouldn't play. Coach told me to stop throwing that crap curve I thought was so good and wasn't nice about it in the end since his attempts to be nice about it hadn't sunk in. He probably saved my arm as a result, and he certainly helped me get my head straight about what my what my true talents were, i.e. not baseball.

I'm much more concerned with the underlying philosophy that suggests excellence needs to be toned down when faced with poor opposition. This kind of thinking ends up infecting academics as well. I've seen it and suffered from it, and it tends to be the same type of mentality at work.

We had a guy on our academic bowl team who basically had a photographic memory. On a four person panel, he always, always, always hit his buzzer first, and I never saw him get an answer incorrect. And other teams complained about it, and some of the parents of other kids on our team complained as well about when their kid would get a chance, and our coach made him sit out a few tournaments out of what she called "good sportsmanship." What kind of message is that? You have a talent; don't use it? We wound up losing once because of this nonsense. He was our "expert" on short-answer lightning rounds. That was his position, and he was made to feel like a "bad sport" because of how good he was.

There were a lot of other elements to these tournaments where the rest of us had our own areas. Would it have been proper to sit me out because I seemed always be able to answer the history or political questions while our opponents sat there still thinking or other people on our team focused on the math or the science and tackled all those questions? Well, that happened to me. "Give someone else a chance," I was told. Give them a chance to what? Prove that even though they didn't study as hard as I did that they too could get by? We had a guy on our team who was the laziest individual it was ever my displeasure to know. His mother made this huge fuss after tryouts that basically forced him in as an alternate, and then she fussed some more until he got his chance to "shine" with the rest of us, only he didn't shine. He just sat there looking like the lazy, unprepared dolt he was, but he got that gold medal his mommy wanted as the rest of the team somehow managed to take up the slack. That ended up having a somewhat positive effect on us in the sense it taught us to deal with adversity and overcome it, but it also taught us -- or could have if we took it that way -- that as long as you surround yourself with people who are talented or who work hard, you too can "get by."

Anyway ... sorry. Whenever I see this as an issue, that's the sort of thing of which I am reminded, and it's a bit personal.

If there's excessive taunting or some such thing, okay, that's extremely bad form just plain rude and should be addressed. (And, really, this is more about the coaches, yet the kids are the ones being punished from the way it looks.) Suggesting they should have stopped trying to be their best is not, imo.

OnEdit: I should add as an extension of the comment about the coaches here being the problem that, yes, they should have had the very last string in the game getting playing time, and I can't quite tell if that's what happened. If they didn't that's a coaching mistake. If they did and still ran up the score like this, well ... you don't tell someone who never gets to play *not* to play the best he or she can when they do get a chance.

[Yukari Yakumo]

43. What I'd like to know is...

How the heck do you go an entire game without scoring a single point?

[DefenseLawyer]

21. Full court press up by 60

Oh and jack up a few more threes. Stay classy San Diego

[TexasObserver]

23. Because JESUS loves teams that win big.

shameful conduct by the winners team and supporters

[RB TexLa]

26. For those who don't know, Dallas Academy specializes in students with learning problems

They only have 40 girls enrolled at the school and 8 on the basketball team. The girls basketball team has canceled the rest of their season.

They have never won a girls basketball game and the other school was not dumb to this, it was only after it became news and TAPPS came out with a statement that they sought to forfeit the game.

[BlooInBloo]

28. I was thinking that a loss that lopsided should indicate...

That either one team needs to be in a higher division, or the other team needs to be in a lower division.

With those kind of numbers, the latter would seem to be indicated.

[malletgirl02]

34. I was thinking that myself

I know public schools have different divisions depending on school size, I was wondering if private schools had divisions as well. If they don't they need to.

[MichaelHarris]

37. I feel

very, very bad for them but canceling the rest of the season sends the wrong message. They don't get to "quit" life when it gets hard.

[ColbertWatcher]

39. That is disgraceful. n/t

[muriel_volestrangler]

41. Only about 20 girls in the high school, according to the article

Though the Covenant School may not be huge - http://www.covenantdallas.com/podium/default.aspx?t=32092 "134 pupils in grades 7-12", and it's a mixed school, so girls at high school level (grades 10-12?) would be a quarter of that - 34, perhaps?

However, since the Dallas Academy hadn't won a game in 4 years, you might think their whole schedule needs rethinking - unless there is no-one else to play.

[4lbs]

32. Here in Southern California, I remember about 20 years ago, when one of the high school conferences

had just started with girls basketball. They instituted a 40-point "mercy rule". Once any school had a 40 point margin over another one, the game was automatically stopped and winner declared.

[taught_me_patience]

35. Bush league by Covenant

Continuing to press and shoot threes when the game was out of hand. This is actually dangerous because if I were on Dallas, I would be fouling hard. The forfeiture is pretty lame too.

[shintao]

38. Oh Really!!

My hats off to the winning team and what a margain of victory. I wonder if the game made YouTube?

Dallas must have spent too much time in the showers, instead of practice.

And before you jump, let me ask, just what number of point difference should the game be called at, and would that still be a forfit? What 20-0 15-0 10-0? Got a magic number for us?

[Two Americas]

48. don't be absurd

The "magic number" was 100, and the winning team was going for that.

There are no hard and fast rules about this, and asking for them is disingenuous.

Teams show mercy to over matched opponents all of the time. It is the classy and decent thing to do.

This pour it on, grab all you can, run up the score, crush the opponent and show no mercy mentality is the essence of the approach to life than underpins the political right wing. On the sports boards around the Internet, that is quite obvious, as those praising the winning team are connecting that to Reaganomics and Ayn Rand libertarianism, and are mocking those calling for fair play and decency as liberals and Democrats.

[Sanctified]

40. LOL, Punish one team for excelling and rewarding another for being terrible, I get it.

I think they should kick the other team out of the league, if they are that bad they should not be playing another team of that caliber. Don't punish a team for being good, punish the other team for wasting everyone's time by showing up and not even putting any effort into it.

[Two Americas]

46. interesting

I visited a few sports boards, and those defending the team that ran up the score see their point of view as being consistent with and informed by the most extreme right wing political positions - Reaganomics, survival of the fittest, libertarianism, greed is good, mercy is weakness - and mock and ridicule those calling for good sportsmanship as bleeding heart liberals who are tearing down America.

[onenote]

50. Pressing -- over the top; shooting 3s? Hard to say. Did they slow the game down at all?

Pressing when you have a margin like Covenant had, and the opposition was no threat, seems over the top. Shooting 3s might have been or might not have been. If I was coaching them, I would have, at some point, certainly in the second half, called off the press and told my team I expected them to slow the pace of the game and only take shot towards the end of the shot clock. Whether that shot was 3 or a 2 would be of little import -- shooting 3s would be lower percentage, but making easy layups against an essentially defenseless opponent would be running it up as well. If Covenant was hurrying their shots in order to try to get to the magic 100 mark, then I think they overstepped the bounds of sportsmanship.

on edit: it appears that Covenant only scored 12 points in the fourth quarter and quit trying to score at all for the final four minutes. That's a plus for them. The fact that they scored 39 points in the third quarter (after scoring 59 in the first half) -- not a plus.