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Coach fired over 100-0 win
The coach of a Texas high school basketball team that beat another team by 100-0 reportedly got the boot after he allegedly refused to apologize for the wide-margin victory. The controversy started Jan. 13 when the Covenant School’s girls’ basketball team racked up a 100-0 win over Dallas Academy, a small private school for students with learning disabilities. News outlets quickly picked up on the story and began questioning the Christian school’s sportsmanship in winning by such a large margin.
Last week Covenant School issued an apology to the Dallas Academy and said it is seeking to forfeit the game because “victory without honor is a great loss.” According to a statement posted on the school’s website, “It is shameful and an embarrassment that this happened. … The school and its representatives in no way support or condone the running up of a score against any team in any sport for any reason.”
Former Covenant School Coach Micah Grimes didn’t concur, however:
“I respectfully disagree with the apology, especially the notion that the Covenant School girls basketball team should feel ‘embarrassed’ or ‘ashamed,’” Grimes wrote in an e-mail posted on a youth basketball Web site on Sunday and published in The Dallas Morning News.
“We played the game as it was meant to be played and would not intentionally run up the score on any opponent. Although a wide-margin victory is never evidence of compassion, my girls played with honor and integrity and showed respect to Dallas Academy.”
What’s your take?
back to top26 Comments to “Coach fired over 100-0 win”
The coach SHOULD be fired for humiliating the other team. What he did was terrible as I believe that many kids with LDs do not have a great deal of self-confidence anyway My son plays BB for a small Christian school and on their schedule is a school similar to Dallas Academy (students with LDs). I would be ashamed if the coach had them run up the score to 100-0. In situations where there is a mismatch in abilities our coach instructs the boys to hold back.
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Is uspect there’s more to this story than we’ve been told. How did this schedule happen? How long did the coach keep the first team in? If he let the first team play 3/4, he’s culpable. However, you can’t train athletes to “hold back”. Always play your best.
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I dont know about an apology for winning.
I do think rudimentary good sportsmanship might require the winner to approach the losing coach with something like “Hey, let’s you and I meet up to discuss some ways you can improve your team’s playing.. IHOP Saturday at 0700? Be there! And your Rooty Jr will be my treat!”
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I blame the other team’s coach. He had no business putting his team up against a team that they could not hold their own with. It’s his fault for exposing his team to such a defeat and to embarrassment.
Would the girls on that team really feel better if the coach on the winning team put in his third-string players and told them to just let their opponents score? What kind of competition would that be?
And it’s absurd to feel sorry for LD kids. They’re not unintelligent. To qualify for the LD label, they must have at least average IQ. Some of them are exceptional athletes, because it is often the only area in which they shine.
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Contrary to what the national media initially reported, it does seem that Grimes did try to show restraint during the game, as evidenced by the fact that he took three of Covenant’s starters out fairly early, and by the quarter-by-quarter scoring: 35, 24, 29, 12. However, I don’t know why he felt compelled to keep Covenant in a full-court press for the first five minutes of the game – it should have been clear early that that wasn’t necessary. It seems that the bigger question here is why Covenant was scheduled to play a team like Dallas Academy which has students with learning disabilities.
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I agree with the “more to the story” theory. One has to wonder if these teams normally compete in the same district or conference. Having coached basketball in a small, private school, I know the frustration of trying to schedule schools that are comparable in terms of enrollment and resources.
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Most coaches are hired so they can motivate team members to win games. So it seems to me that he was fired for doing his job. I am with Chas on this one. I believe there is more to this than what is being said in either the Dallas Morning News or the School’s web site.
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Any coach at the high-school level should know how to manage his team in a situation of mismatch. There are many options to manage the game, and many opportunities to teach sportsmanship.
Having coached multiple girls sports teams, I’ve been on both sides of a mismatch before. In a situation of this magnitude, the two team coaches should speak during the game about options (during time-outs, at halftime, etc.). I’ve found that if you are the dominant team and you hold-back too much and your players obviously ‘tank it’ it can actually worsen the problem. But if the coach has any chops at all, he can certainly finesse this. And, as mentioned before, teach sportsmanship.
Coaches holding there teams back during a blow-out is common in all sports – except maybe for Big 12 BCS teams (sorry I had to get that shot in)! Mike Krzyzewski of Duke doesn’t play his starting lineup and press when he’s drubbing Presbyterian by 40 points.
I didn’t see the game, but I can’t see how I could let a game get to 100-0, or even 59-0 at the half. The Covenent team coaches should have found a way for the opposing team to at least get on the scoreboard earlier in the game (technical fouls, a few uncontested shots/layups, etc.).
Finally, three cheers for the Dallas Academy girls! Their statements in the linked article show a lot of pride and class.
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I read the story, and it wasn’t the fact that the girls had learning disabilities that made them a bad team, but the fact that it was a small school and the total enrollment of girls was only 30. Not a very large pool of players, obviously. And they had never won a game against any team in 4 years.
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What I don’t understand is how people, and particularly Christians, can be so tone deaf.
Does anyone think the Holy Spirit wasn’t muttering to someone?
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I’ll probably get flamed for this, but for me, this just shows that the idea of youth team sports is fundamentally flawed. I haven’t seen any evidence at all that it builds character, but rather brings out the worst in people by fostering a them-vs.-us, winning-is-everything mentality. None of the truly successful people I know say “I became the man I am through high-school football”. Their formative experiences always came later, in places like the military or med school or first jobs.
The physical fitness aspect is there, but their are ways to get that without organized spots.
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What bothered me was that these were Christian schools — how do we glorify God with our play? A mismatch like this can play out a lot differently, as this column from Rick Reilly points out.
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In the reports I read, it seems that Dallas Academy routinely gets beat by 50 points or so a game. Also, the fans were screaming for the 100 point threshold to be crossed. And the players were still shooting 3 pointers in the fourth quarter. The coach didn’t stop this. I’m not sure he should have been fired, but that’s just a lack of class.
When I was in high school, I remember we had to play a high school called Toombs Central (the school has subsequently closed and the students were merged with another high school in that county). I think there were only 200 kids in the whole high school, and it was amazing they could field a team to begin with. They routinely lost football games by 40 points or more. Someone might ask, “Why was your school playing them?” We were all playing in the small classification in the state — none of the schools they played had more than 500 students. There simply was no one else to play. One of our players said that before the game, the referees came up to the coaching staff and players and basically said that they knew the other team was going to commit holding penalties just about every play, but they weren’t going to call them because it wouldn’t realy make any difference and it would just make the game too long. Our team still won something like 49-6.
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This story is very one-sided. The silence from Dallas Academy is deafening. What did the refs officiating the game, say? Did they call any technical fouls for unsportsman-like conduct? Well?
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I would fire whoever scheduled that game in the first place, if that’s not the coach. If you don’t want mismatched scores, don’t schedule mismatches.
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The score alone is not justification for firing a coach. It seems that the scoring trended down during the game and thus if he was truly “running-up” the score it could have been much worse. One of the most difficult lessons to learn is that “Life isn’t fair.” If the issue is simply the meanness of scoring too many points on a defenseless opponent, then to teach the lesson most effectively and “fairly” they should kick any girl off the team who scored too many points, or blocked too many shots, or didn’t slack off on defense, etc.
Unless there are more serious problems with the coach (which I too assume there must be) this is being blown way out of proportion.
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He ran up the score. There isn’t a way to win 100-0 without having run up the score.
I understand that he left his starters in well past half time (where he had a 59-0 lead).
When I coached, I would make certain that a totally overmatched opponent didn’t get humiliated. There was only one game where I had my team run the score – and that was where the team was in a situation where we were tied with another team in the qualifying round for the state championship game and the tie breaker was the teams’ respective goal differentials, and the other team was going to play its last game after ours. I had to have my team run the score to put the goal differential as out of reach as possible for the other team (when it played later).
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Some kid sports have a rule ending a game if one team has a big lead and holds it for a speicified period of time. In this case, maybe if one team held a 40 point lead for 2:00, the game would end. Sounds like a good rule.
Also, a story I read on this game pointed out that Covenant School had been on the losing end of an 84-6 score two seasons ago.
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My take is that the score of that game is not as important as the homework each team member took home to do after the game. But homework is not much of a news story. Beyond that, there may be more to this story than we know. But from what little I have read, I think the winning coach did lose sight of the human context–which is something our mainstream media does on a far larger scale every single day.
Move on.
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Mercy rules are generally a good thing. They lend themselves more readily to some sports than others (e.g. softball/baseball). Our youth basketball league used to shut off the scoreboard if the point differential became too large. I can’t see this happening at the high-school level though.
100-0 is just too clean of a score to shrug off. I get the sense that at some point, the goal of the team (both players and coach) became: “Let’s see if we can get 100 points!”. Or: “Let’s see if we can shut them out completely.”
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As a parent of kids who are involved in school sports and activities; I must confess that I would be embarrassed by being on either side of the score. The refs should have called the game after the third quarter.
They say that losing builds character…imagine the growth potential of this game!???
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imagine the growth potential of this game!???
Absolutely! Margins of victory are relative. If the Republican party was afraid of the drubbing they might receive at the hands of the Democrats, they wouldn’t have bothered fielding a candidate. But they did and suffered for it.
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The world is not fair—never has been, never will be. Why do we think we can change that by setting up falsified-equity utopias for our kids to grow up in and then expect them to succeed in the real world when confronted with serious issues among people who understand “real”? I think we’re mistaken and our children will be seriously and dangerously disillusioned. The history of successfully negotiated peace conferences in advance of conflict proves that point.
Since none of us were at the game to know whole the truth, I also don’t think we have enough information to form accurate opinions regarding the “discipline” of the coach if indeed any is required. I don’t believe he was hired to lose games when some think he should and also win when some think he should. Kinda impossible to please everyone isn’t it?
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Perhaps the refs — or maybe even the winning team — shoulda called the game at the half.
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#11 John M,
Right on. It took us much, much too long to figure this out. Sigh… Our family wasted so much time, but sports, whether youth or not, will no longer be idols in our lives.
On a similar note, what a waste of time watching professional sports on TV or live! Now it’ll be me getting flamed.
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I’m surprised and impressed that with one or two exceptions the participants here didn’t recite the creed of “life ain’t fair” and competition is everything.
The self-justifying coach did so, however, in claiming that “we played the game as it was meant to be played.” There is no one way basketball is “meant” to be played — the objectives can fit the circumstances of the participants.
The full-court press was wrong, as others pointed out. The Covenant team should have used the game to pass the ball around. That’s playing, too, and useful practice.
Another reason for firing the coach is that he tempted his players to think too highly of themselves.
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