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This morning, I read a news item on the Yahoo! home page about a high school basketball game between Earlsboro High School and Hanna High School in Oklahoma.  There was nothing particularly special about this game; it wasn't a playoff or State Championship contest or anything like that.  What made this game newsworthy was the final score.  Earlsboro won the game 112-2.  That is not a misprint.  The Earlsboro coach was quoted in the news item as saying that the game was "embarrassing to watch."  The coach went on to say that he "couldn't" order his players to stop running up the score.

I have been involved with sports almost my entire life, both as a player and a fan, and I want to say right now that I wholeheartedly disagree with this coach.  Running up the score in such a fashion goes against the unwritten code of sportsmanship that applies to every sport out there.  I contend that the coach not only could have told his players not to shoot the ball and instead to pass a lot and help run out the clock, but also should have done so in keeping with good sportsmanship.  After all, coaches on every level, from youth leagues all the way to the pros do the same thing.

I went to a high school with a very good softball program.  Our teams regularly advanced to the state tournament each year, and we had several players win athletic scholarships to great colleges.  We even had a player go on to win a gold medal with the women's softball team at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.  In short, we were a good team, and our opponents were not always evenly matched.  Anyway, when the score started getting out of hand (for example, if we were ahead by 10 runs or more and it was clear that the other team didn't have the skills to mount a comeback), our coach immediately took action to preserve the other team's dignity.  This was accomplished in a variety of ways, including swinging at bad pitches on purpose in order to strike out.  Our team members understood why we were doing it, and no one complained.  

You see this very thing in the professional ranks, too.  For example, if a football team is ahead by several touchdowns, they don't keep throwing bombs down the field in order to score even more.  Instead, they run the ball on every down and make conservative plays.  With time running out, the quarterback just kneels in order to kill the play, even if the team is well within field goal range.  

The bottom line here is that I feel the kind of display put on by the Earlsboro basketball team showed very poor judgment on the part of the coach.  I guess some would argue that in "real life" nobody is going to cut you any slack and ease up on you.  But this wasn't "real life".  It was just a meaningless basketball game.  The coach should have reined his players in and showed them what sportsmanship was all about.  I feel bad for the kids on Hanna High because they lost by 110 points, but I feel even worse for the kids on Earlsboro.