12/21/24
September 16, 2009
Defending a 83-0 rout.: "We did not go into the game looking to score that many points,'' Chaminade-Madonna football coach Tim Tyrrell said, "and a lot of them came in bunches and off big plays."
The running up the score story from a while back was about a girls' high school (or junior high) basketball team that was running a full court press throughout the fourth quarter to win a game 100-0 against a team from a school for students with learning disabilities. Slightly different context.
posted by holden at 09:40 PM on September 16, 2009
Like Joey said, the team seems to have done all it could to prevent themselves from running up the score. For many of the kids who are backups, this may be their best opportunity to get playing time the entire season. To think that they wouldn't try their best is ludicrous.
posted by Ying Yang Mafia at 09:47 PM on September 16, 2009
The running up the score story from a while back was about a girls' high school (or junior high) basketball team that was running a full court press throughout the fourth quarter to win a game 100-0 against a team from a school for students with learning disabilities.
I figured this would be brought back up, and immediately my first thought was, "Someone's going to bring up the disabled thing." So here's the exact disability in question: "trouble with concentration and short attention spans."
Thank you for your time.
posted by wfrazerjr at 10:37 PM on September 16, 2009
So they've forgotten about the loss already then?
posted by owlhouse at 11:05 PM on September 16, 2009
I figured this would be brought back up, and immediately my first thought was, "Someone's going to bring up the disabled thing." So here's the exact disability in question: "trouble with concentration and short attention spans."
wfrazerjr, I'm not sure my post is the right one to use to make your point, at least in the form you are making it here. What you refer to as the "the disabled thing" was referenced in my post as "learning disabilities"; I was not trying to suggest (as your post seems to imply, but perhaps that's an uncharitable reading) that this was a group of developmentally delayed and/or physically disabled students and was, in fact, simply using the terminology in the article linked in the prior discussion. Trouble with concentration and short attention spans, while arguably being symptomatic of being a teenager in general, seems to fit within a reasonable definition of learning disabilities. Perhaps your point is just that it's superfluous and/or a red herring to even make reference to the learning disability thing, because it should not factor into the discussion of whether what the other school did was okay, bad, or the worst ever, but you could make that point without stripping the nuance out of my summary of the prior situation.
posted by holden at 11:59 PM on September 16, 2009
a high school landscape increasingly aware of sportsmanship issues
Let's expand this out a little and avoid retreading old ground: is one of the structural disadvantages of the big American sports their greater tendency to set up routs, hence the need for mercy rules and palliative coaching? I'm quite certain that every week of this NCAA football season, for instance, there'll be a fair amount of games, not just powderpuff ones, that are basically over by half time.
See, I absolutely understand the don't-rub-it-in attitude when the scores are lopsided -- empty the bench, don't go for the showy long pass, don't steal bases, don't run the full-court press -- but I also know that situations like that are pretty rare in classic British school sports, i.e. soccer, rugby, cricket, hockey, netball. Even obvious mismatches don't create the same ethical quandaries. I just can't imagine a British school or youth club football coach getting sacked for leading a team to a 15-0 victory, or a cricket coach telling his batsmen to drag things out any more than caution dictates after the bowlers have skittled the opposition.
posted by etagloh at 02:56 AM on September 17, 2009
I love skittles!
posted by irunfromclones at 03:04 AM on September 17, 2009
Agreed etagloh - but where we come from (Britain and Australia), sport tends to get organised into divisions where major mismatches are rare events in the first place.
You may remember that in qualifying matches for the 2002 World Cup, Australia thumped Tonga 22-0 and American Samoa 31-0. This was done by Football Australia for a purpose - to demonstrate to FIFA that they were too strong for Oceania, and thus to ensure that it wouldn't happen again. It didn't - for 2006, the weaker Oceania nations played off first before New Zealand*, Australia and the other heavyweights joined in. Another result was that Australia was admitted to the Asian Confederation soon afterwards.
Mismatches don't do anyone any good, and having coached in both Tonga and Samoa, I understand that getting regularly thumped by professionals is not the way to develop football in those places. Although some of my counterparts said they miss the challenge of going up against the big boys**.
*NB: possibly the first time the All Whites have ever been described as 'heavyweights', although they are only a home and away playoff against Bahrain away from qualifying for South Africa next year.
**And when a Tongan or Samoan describes you as one of the 'big boys', you know he is not being literal.
posted by owlhouse at 03:13 AM on September 17, 2009
Agreed about the way divisions even things out -- with promotion and relegation, most of the time -- but there's meant to be pretty fine-grained handicapping even at the high school level in the US. Admittedly, the looser scheduling means that you'll have those powderpuff games in American seasons that are designed to perpetuate old rivalries or pad the win column by bribing a weaker team to come and get hammered, but the blowouts aren't always in those mismatches. (Every week of the NFL will also have one or two games where you could imagine a mercy rule kicking in, as the Panthers will testify after Sunday.)
I wasn't aware of the details behind the 'roos left Oceania -- thanks for that.
posted by etagloh at 03:52 AM on September 17, 2009
Regarding high schools, recently our high school athletic association in New Jersey forced a revamping of leagues in North Jersey. Members of our new Essex County league have been slotted into four divisions based on performance during the past two seasons. The alignment may be different for different sports, so a school could be in several divisions based on if its a strong program or an also-ran. The idea is simple: teams play against like-talented teams, hopefully minimizing any blowouts. The divisions will be realigned every two years through promotion and relegation.
posted by jjzucal at 09:58 AM on September 17, 2009
holden,
It would have just as easy to make your post and leave out the "learning disabilities" part. There was absolutely no use to that information in the original post -- aside from people using it to demonize the winning team.
There's no mention of the losing team here being disabled in any way, so how does help this discussion?
posted by wfrazerjr at 11:10 AM on September 17, 2009
I don't think changing divisions would really have helped prevent this result since Pompano Beach beat Chaminade-Madonna last year.
posted by bperk at 11:19 AM on September 17, 2009
holden,
It would have just as easy to make your post and leave out the "learning disabilities" part. There was absolutely no use to that information in the original post -- aside from people using it to demonize the winning team.
There's no mention of the losing team here being disabled in any way, so how does help this discussion?
Fair point. I was just trying to capture the spirit/content of the prior thread, but as I noted above, I agree that mentioning the learning disability angle is unnecessary. My issue with your characterization was simply that it seemed to mischaracterize what I specifically said.
posted by holden at 11:42 AM on September 17, 2009
There was absolutely no use to that information in the original post -- aside from people using it to demonize the winning team.
Don't you think it is much more difficult to teach basketball to children that have difficulty concentrating and short attention spans?
posted by bperk at 12:03 PM on September 17, 2009
I figured this would be brought back up, and immediately my first thought was, "Someone's going to bring up the disabled thing." So here's the exact disability in question: "trouble with concentration and short attention spans." Thank you for your time.
That's a misread of the original article. It stated that "short attention spans and concentration" were some learning disabilities, not the only ones. The reporter did a poor job on that.
If you've ever dealt with these disabilities in a child before, as I have, it's not something to completely dismiss as insignificant. I hate the way kids are overmedicated by some mental health practitioners. But sometimes they're medicated because they can't focus or learn any other way.
Whether the learning disabilities of the Dallas Academy players is a factor worth talking about, in that rout, depends on the nature of those disabilities.
posted by rcade at 12:27 PM on September 17, 2009
While I like the idea of the promotion/relegation system, I see several problems with the plan. JJuzcal, if you know how North Jersey addressed these, please let us know.
1. Cost. Most of the leagues/classifications around where I am from (western Massachusetts) are based on geography. If you were to strictly base the classifications on talent level you would see teams needing to travel further to face each other.
For example, my sophomore year of high school, Berkshire County attempted to divide teams based on past performance with the stronger teams making up the north division and the weaker teams in the south division. This resulted in 2 of the weaker teams from opposite ends of the county being in the same division, and leaving the teams with a 1 1/2 hour drive (by school bus) each way when they met for home and home series during the season. Across multiple sports, this adds up in extra mileage on the buses, gas, OT for the driver and takes away from time the players had to themselves.
I do not know if this system is still in place, but I know from talking to some players at one of the schools, that they dreaded the trip to the other school, only because the ride was so long.
2. Continuity- Using my school as an example again, we went 4 years between wins in soccer so an entire graduating class went through school without ever getting a win. However when they got their first win my freshman year, it was recognized as a new beginning. Starting with my junior year, the team would make the western mass tourney 3 times in the next 3 years on the strength of 2 talented classes. But after those 2 classes graduated, the school went right back to its losing ways.
With the relegation system, you could see a school get promoted on the strength of 1 or 2 good classes and then be outclassed for 2 years after those classes graduate, leaving the schools set up to face these situations consistently because they would be facing good schools every week, not every few weeks as they would when broken up geographically.
I live very close to the Mass/CT state line and there was a minor controversy around here a few years back because one of the high school teams in Enfield, CT lost to another team by more than 50 points (60-0) not too long after the state had implemented the rule. While I felt bad for the kids who played for Fermi, I don't believe that the East Hartford team should be punished for facing a lesser team.
I have not fully thought this idea thru or how to best implement, but my approach would be to institute the running clock rule starting with any 35 point lead, and also to remove a player from the field for as long as a team has a 35 point or greater lead and play 10 on 11. If the team that trails gets the lead back under 35, then you go back to 11 on 11 as long as the lead stays under 35, but the clock remains continuous until the end of the game. This will allow the lesser team to continue to play, lets 10 of the back ups on the better team get some time and is no more embarrassing than having to watch the other team take a knee for half a game. I
If nothing else the secondary on the better team gets practice on how to handle a situation that broke down, or d-line sees how to handle a double team. I also think that this could be applied across multiple sports and isn't totally unprecedented as you see soccer teams that play a man down when players get a red card.
posted by Demophon at 02:54 PM on September 17, 2009
NH has the running clock rule in place, but only if one team is up by 35 after the half. Still, the number of >50 point blowouts is quite small. As far as level of competition goes, schools here are generally slotted in terms of enrollment, but they may opt to move up in division. One good example is Bishop Guertin of Nashua, that plays a Division 2 schedule, and regularly succeeds, despite having the enrollment of a smaller school. Of course, the private religious schools here in NH have somewhat of an advantage in that they can attract top players from other towns, and even out of state. It all evens out, I suppose.
posted by Howard_T at 03:59 PM on September 17, 2009
Understood, holden -- my apologies also for being a jerk.
rcade, I read the Dallas Academy web site at the time, and I just read it again. Acoording to them, the learning disabilities are pretty standard -- ADD, ADHD, dyslexia. They could affect the ability of the players, or they might not. Depends on the severity, medication, etc.
I spent three years teaching children with learning and behavioural disabilities. Some of them were able to play organized sports with no issues. Others weren't. I'm assuming because Dallas Academy has a team these students are able to function on the court. If not ... well, I wouldn't know what to think about that.
posted by wfrazerjr at 04:41 PM on September 17, 2009
I wasn't there, but it sounds like Coach Tyrrell really did everything short of telling his players not to play their best to even out the playing field a little.
We had a similar "running up the score" story a year or so ago that seemed a little more outrageous.
If there isn't a provision that allows for the officials to apply a mercy rule, then all the coach can do is field his greener players. That said, in my heart, I know I said something the opposite of this in that other thread and, for the life of me, I can't remember why.