I didn’t want to write about this.  I swear I didn’t want to write about this.  Last week this was just a sporting curiosity, but now it’s become a national story.  If you haven’t seen this anywhere yet, the Covenant School defeated Dallas Academy in girls’ basketball by the score of 100-0.  This probably sounds like an absurd score to you, and that’s because it is.  The reason I didn’t want to write about this, is because everything about it should be intuitively obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense.  The unfortunate truth, however, is that there are people who don’t see anything wrong with a final score of 100-0, or how it was achieved.

I coach youth sports.  I’ve been coaching for more than fifteen years, and I’ve been on both sides of a lot of lopsided victories.  One thing I know is that kids aren’t stupid.  They know when a team is better than they are.  They know when a team is running up the score, and they also know when a team is patronizing them by not trying.  There’s a balance in between than needs to be maintained in this situation, but it’s really not hard to find that balance.

In baseball, you start holding up runners on the bases.  You stop giving steal signs.  You replace your pitcher with someone who needs the work.  You take your starters out of the game.  I’ve even had a coach pull his 3-4-5 hitters out of the game against me, citing “injury”, so that he could put three weaker players who had already been taken out of the game back in.  You’ve got options.

But here’s where the balance comes in: you don’t tell your players to strike out on purpose.  You don’t tell your players to stop running hard.  You don’t tell your players to stop playing defense.  You don’t tell your players to bunt if it’s not part of your normal strategy.  If you do these things, it’s no better than running up the score.

Basketball, admittedly, is a much different sport, and it’s probably more difficult to keep a disparity in talent from showing up in the score book.  Jeff Miller’s piece on ESPN Rise explains that women’s basketball is a sport “particularly susceptible to blowouts”.  You can’t tell your players to stop shooting, and you can’t tell your players to stop playing defense, and you can’t tell your players to stop running.  But there are things you can do.

Various people who were involved with the 100-0 game, both participants and spectators, have mentioned that Covenant kept launching three-pointers even after the game was well in hand.  I don’t really see an issue with that.  While a 3-pointer (obviously) is worth more points than a regular shot, it’s a lower percentage shot, and in my mind it’s probably better to be shooting threes in a blowout than it is to be posting up players in the paint, assuming there’s a shot clock that requires the offensive team to shoot.  What’s not clear from reading the coverage of the game is whether or not Covenant was working the shot clock and firing away only when it was into single digits.  What is clear is that the team was playing a press defense for most of the game, until, as one spectator claims, the team reached 100 points, which is absolutely inexcusable.  By all accounts the Dallas Academy point guard was not very skilled at bringing the ball up the floor, and Covenant’s point guard took advantage of that, stealing the ball away whenever possible.

Covenant’s point guard scored 48 points, in what was described as “Steal and layup. Steal and layup. It was a layup drill.” (which makes me wonder how many threes they were actually taking, if the game was a layup drill).  I’m singling her out only to point out that none of these kids should be singled out.  There is such pressure placed on youth sports in this country, that players will do what their coaches tell them to do or what keeps them on the team, to the detriment of what’s fair and what’s good.  Kids will bean an autistic teammate if their coach tells them to.  Kids will practice until they drop if they’re worried about being cut from a team.  If a coach tells his kid to keep stealing the ball away, that’s what the kid is going to do.  If the coach says “Hey, back off and let her bring the ball up the court,” that’s also what the kid is going to do.  Even better, take a timeout and tell the whole team to drop into zone defense and stop going for steals.

There are a number of differing views about who’s to blame in this game.  Some people think that the opposing coach is at fault, for a variety of ridiculous reasons including not pulling his team off the court at halftime, or not confronting the coach of the other team while the shellacking was taking place.  Others blame the administration from the losing team for scheduling teams that are vastly superior to them (most of these people ignore that the boys’ team from Dallas Academy beat Covenant the last time out), or for even fielding a girls’ team at all when their total female enrollment is only twenty.

All of this is deflecting blame from the coach who pushed his team to not only shut out an opposing team in basketball, but drop 100 points on them in the process.  And there’s no way anyone can possibly defend that.