School Apologizes After 100-0 Win
Anyone playing or watching basketball knows a 100-0 win is impossible. Sorry, sports fans. It happened in Dallas in a girls high school 32-minute regulation basketball game. The winning team has offered to forfeit.
“It is shameful and an embarrassment that this happened,” the head of the school said Thursday on The Covenant School’s Web site. He added that Covenant has made “a formal request to forfeit the game recognizing that a victory without honor is a great loss.”
Covenant, a private Christian school in Dallas, defeated Dallas Academy. 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.
Dallas Academy has eight girls on its varsity team and about 20 girls in its high school. It is winless over the last four seasons. The academy boasts of its small class sizes and specializes in teaching students struggling with “learning differences,” such as short attention spans or dyslexia.
There is no mercy rule in girls basketball that shortens the game or permits the clock to continue running when scores become lopsided. There is, however, “a golden rule” that should have applied in this contest, said Edd Burleson, the director of the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools.
This game played last week epitomizes the moral dilemma facing coaches and parents in regards to youth sports.
The players on the winning team cannot be blamed. They want to win, are coached to win, and if the score gets out of hand, it’s not their problem while on the playing field. Some may feel remorse after the fact. That’s the competitive nature of sports.
Coaches and parents are at fault when games become 100-0 massacres. What glory is there when the opponent is physically or mentally handicapped?
I’m an old school practitioner. I see no merit in awarding a trophy to a kid just for participating in a sport. Trophies are awarded to winners for the right reasons: They earned it. As for the Texas case, the Covenant coach should be reassigned but the game not forfeited.
Americans are blinded by jock adulation. The Heisman Trophy, the most prestigious award in college football, is named after the Georgia Tech coach who in a fit of vendetta allowed his players to defeat Cumberland College 220-0.
Cross posted onThe Remmers Report
4 Responses to “School Apologizes After 100-0 Win”
Wow, I was literally just about to post this……
Great story
Yes, the golden rule should apply…. there is no honor in wiping the floor with a team who is handicapped and has not won a game in four seasons. What message are we conveying to our youth when we let them pursue their own selfish gratification of winning when the opposing team is not on the same level as they are? Hardly Christian it seems to me….
There are honest, fair and challenging games people play. Then there are times when we need to behave like humans and have compassion for those less fortunate, times when our less-worthy opponents face us by circumstance.
I'm not saying Covenant should throw the game… but they didn't have to batter Dallas Academy.
Not to want to sound heartless, but what was Dallas Academy doing playing The Covenant School in the first place? Surely the coaching staff of a twenty girl high school should have known what would have happened. That coach should have asked to play the junior varsity or an equivalent team.
The Convenant coach should have put in his scrubs (perhaps the coach did?) early in the game but if the Dallas Academy players were really bad, the score may have been the same. It seems as if no one on the DA team had any skills if no points were scored. Dyslexia and ADD should not have had that much effect on skill levels.
My children went to a small academically strong school whose football team did not score a point in one season until a touchdown in the last game playing against the third team of a well coached school. In later years they had some very good teams and won two state championships. The teams that piled on in the past paid for their indiscretions while the other teams just lost. Our coach, knowing the vagaries of high school sports, never played his first string in the fourth quarter except in the playoffs. There were still games with 43 point differences in spite of an effort to keep the score down but the other teams, with the exception of the one team who never gave us a break in the past, acknowledged the score as a factor of team quality differences and did not complain. The other team, whose coach was a hopeless a****le (as everyone in the conference called him) complained about “piling on” even though our coach did not play our best players in the last quarter and he would give no quarter if the situation was reversed.
I suggest that there is more to this story than revealed here.
Hi There. I am a parent of a boy at Dallas Academy. First, thank everyone for your support and good wishes. But I'd like to make a few points here. Learning differences don't make our kids handicapped. They are smart, normal, fun-loving kids. They simply learn differently because of difficulties in reading or auditory processing. Dyslexia, discalculia, ADHD are some of the learning differences. Any why are reporters putting learning differences in quotes? It isn't a euphanism for mentally challenged! Uggh. We have about 180 students in grades 3-12, but since boys tend to be diagnosed more frequently than girls we have fewer girls. Oh, and by the way, my son was on the varsity soccer team that went to state in the same division and league this year. Our sports program is new, especially the girls teams. We're in a much larger league and with much larger schools. Dallas Academy is intentially small so that our kids get more individualized attention. We focus on academics but we want our kids to learn teamwork and sportsmanship through sports. A proud mom and supporter of Dallas Academy.