She Got Gamed?
On January 13, the girls’ basketball team for the Covenant School of Dallas, an elite private Christian school in upscale North Dallas, demolished its opponents from the Dallas Academy, a lesser known East Dallas school that focuses on students who face a variety of learning problems.
Adam Hutchison says: what a bunch of BS. "He obviously was pushing his girls to pile on." That is from your own article. If Covenant was "piling it on" and/or "running up the score", why did they only score 12 points in the 4th quarter? Doesn’t sound like they were "jacking up threes" or playing their hardest, since the scored 39 in the first quarter, like you mentioned. IF they had been piling it on, the score would have been 150-0. The coach who was fired is right, although he could have been more tactful in his statements, and the school administrators are dead wrong. They are probably the same kind of people who want to ban dodgeball, or like at my highschool, changed the name of the "B-Team" basketball team to the "AA-Team" because they thought being on the B-team made the players feel bad. What a crock. (January 26th, 2009 at 2:59pm)
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Perhaps in this sports-crazed state, we should expect that plenty of people would define sport as simply a case of winning versus losing. As one blogger wrote, “The Covenant School simply played as hard as it could for as long as it could. Dallas Academy knew the rules going in. If it couldn’t stand the heat of playing superior talent, it shouldn’t play the game. If players can earn a 100–point victory, they deserve it.”
And as others pointed out, all kids who play sports should be taught to crush the competition. If they don’t develop that attitude, they will not be as successful as they could be. When the news broke that Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban had invited the girls from Dallas Academy to watch a Mavericks game from his suite, someone wrote into the News that Cuban shouldn’t salute losers. “Do you think Cuban would think for more than ten seconds to buy out a struggling business? Basketball is just like life. WIN! Everyone does it. We need to pull our heads out and move on!”
Several letter writers even noted that the University of Texas football team could very well have missed out on the chance to play for the 2008 national title because Mack Brown did not run up scores on weaker opponents. “I bet ol’ Mack doesn’t ever do that again,” someone declared.
In one of his front-page stories, Horn suggested that all high school sports should institute the same sort of rule that exists in six-man football. It’s known as “the 45 rule:” when one team gains a 45-point lead in a game, the game is immediately ended by the referees. It’s like a mercy rule. “Arbitrary decision-making is removed from coaches,” Horn wrote.
But even that idea set off a barrage of complaints. If the rule was adapted, bloggers said, a lot of games would end early, meaning that younger, more inexperienced players would not get the chance to play in a game’s late stages. Some bloggers said a “45 rule” wouldn’t help anyway: coaches would just see how fast they could get to the 45-point difference as a barometer of their team’s success. Other bloggers were simply disgusted with the idea of ending a game early. It was un-American, they said. “A game is 60 minutes long,” wrote someone who called himself Wreck Em. “Play the entire 60 minutes. If you want to play a sport with mercy rules, go play golf. Suck it up. Too many pansies in the world today afraid of getting their feelings hurt.”
There’s a good argument to be made that Dallas Academy should find teams to play that are closer to its own level of athletic competence. Throughout this season, they have lost by wildly lopsided scores to just about everyone. (Several Covenant defenders have wondered why the media didn’t jump on other private schools for whuppin’ up on Dallas Academy by scores like 67–10. “If we had allowed them a couple of layups like the other teams did,” one Covenant supporter wrote, “would we be getting all the bad publicity we are getting now?”) On the other hand, if Dallas Academy did such a thing, they’d probably have to get out of the state’s private school league, meaning they’d have to go through the nearly impossible task of lining up smaller public school opponents outside of Dallas for an entire season.
But even if the girls from Dallas Academy continue to get creamed—and let’s face it, they will—they have come out of all of this with some sort of, well, retribution. The girls have become, in Horn’s words, “America’s sweethearts”—at least for fifteen minutes. They’ve made headlines worldwide and they’ve appeared on the network morning shows at ABC, NBC, and CBS, all of which have portrayed them as loveable losers on the court but genuine winners in life—graceful, poised, determined, always trying, and damned cute.
Dallas Covenant has certainly learned some lessons out of this as well. No doubt the powers that be at the school have learned the value of good public relations. The apology they released came a disastrous ten days after the game and obviously was done only because the story had gone public. Then, it wasn’t until this past Sunday, January 25, that they finally fired Coach Grimes. What took them so long? The score just didn’t “happen,” as the coach put it. He obviously was pushing his girls to pile on. And anyone who believes his statement really needs to reevaluate what they believe fair play and the value of competition is all about.
Anyway, the debate is hardly over. Even after all the hoopla, no one seems to have any idea how to answer the questions that Horn posed in one of his stories: “When is enough, enough? How many points? How large a victory must a high school team achieve to prove it has imposed its will? And where does sportsmanship stand in all of this?”
At least we know one thing. There will be no more girls’ basketball games between Covenant and Dallas Academy. The headmaster of Dallas Academy canceled the school’s January 30 re-match with Covenant. “We just said, The hell with it,” the headmaster told Horn.
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