Don’t punish the victors

Winning must not really be everything.

That’s what we learned two weeks ago when two Texas high school girl’s basketball teams squared off in a game that ended with the Covenant School topping Dallas Academy 100-0.

No, that’s not a misprint. One hundred to zero. Zilch. Nada.

And now, thanks to Covenant School administrators worried about unwritten moral and ethical rules involving sporting competitions and a lack of agreement between them and the head coach, the school has asked to forfeit the game and has fired their coach.

Yes, fired. For winning by too much.

Huh?

It seems Covenant’s move to fire the coach – which judging by reports in the Dallas Morning News happened after the coach publicly disagreed with a school statement apologizing for the win – continues the sorry state of American amateur sports.

You can’t help but place some blame on the all-too-common (insert youth sports league name here) “snack” that has become a requirement for our nation’s youngest athletes.

Let’s face it, Little Timmy playing left field – or is he picking outfield dandelions?  – is happiest when he gets his postgame dugout snack.

Win or lose, Little Timmy still gets his Dunk-a-Roos.

The motto of all sports used to be all about winning, but these days, it’s all about how you play.

Somebody must have forgotten to tell this year’s IU football team’s three opponents  who scored more than 50 points against them that winning wasn’t what mattered. Shame on them for exploiting a Hoosier defense with more pores than an oceanic sponge, right?

For some reason, I never heard calls for apologies from Illinois (55-13), Wisconsin (55-20) or Purdue (62-10). The Hoosier nation simply took it on the chin and moved on.

Perhaps it’s OK to be drubbed on a national stage, but when a few hundred people gather in a Texas private high school gymnasium and see a Covenant point guard convert mindless turnovers into a 48-point scoring day based mostly on layups, life isn’t so peachy.

And perhaps, that same Covenant team who lost 79-33 back in November should be calling for the resignation of that opposing team’s coach.

But instead, the nation has frowned on the efforts of Covenant’s players and applauded the Dallas Academy girls who, in the words of Tom Crean, “never, never, never gave up.”

Never gave up, that is, in pursuit of not scoring a single basket in four quarters. Why is that so commendable?

Was the Covenant victory lopsided and over-the-top? Sure, it wasn’t exactly classy to take a 59-0 halftime lead to an 88-0 lead after three quarters.  

But then again, it might not have been the smartest move for Dallas’ administrators to allow a team that scored a combined 11 points in the previous two games to even take the same floor with a team that averaged 46.5 points in six previous games.

Covenant’s head coach certainly didn’t deserve to lose his job over the win, and its players shouldn’t be vilified for playing to their talents.

They simply did what they were asked to do when they signed up for the girl’s basketball team – win.

Shouldn’t that be everything?