Yesterday The Covenant School of Dallas fired its girls basketball coach, Micah Grimes, because he would not apologize to Dallas Academy for his team's 100-0 victory.
On the coach's web site he posted a statement saying, "I respectfully disagree with the apology, especially the notion that the Covenant School girls basketball team should feel 'embarrassed' or 'ashamed,' " part of the post says. "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."
When the score was 25-0 three minutes into the game, the coach instructed the players to not play a full-court press. In the second quarter he put in his bench players. The winning team made only four 3-point shots, three of them in the first quarter. The coach noted the quarter-by-quarter score: 35, 24, 29, 12.
Covenant School headmaster Kyle Queal announced the firing, saying "It is always good to spread the points around." He suggested a new "athletic justice" rule to take points from winning teams and award them to losing teams.
No word yet on when we can expect an apology from the Dallas Academy coach for stinking so bad.
Monday, January 26, 2009
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3 comments:
e·gal·i·tar·i·an·ism: Believing in the equality of outcomes over the the equality of opportunities.
On the surface I agree with your post. I recently took my teenaged sons to play racquetball. I am an intermediate player at best, but I've played for nearly 30 years; nonetheless, I handily dispatched both of them in every competition. My intrinsic competitive nature would not let me 'throw' a match, though I played a much softer game than I would against more skilled players.
The 'fly in the oinment' in the basketball story is that it's an extremely small school - 40% of the high school girls are on the varsity team - comprised of 'at-risk/learning disadvantaged' kids. These teams probably shouldn't have been paired in the first place.
I have to sympathize with Coach Grimes inasmuch as I'm not sure what he could've done differently and still maintained the competitive ethic.
Isn't that sort of like rewarding failing companies by giving them trillions of dollars in other peoples' money?
I don't know all the details but it reminds me of a story I read about an over-zealous school district in the UK that was so concerned about hurting the feelings of under-achieving students, they proposed dis-continuing the use of the letter "F" for failure. Instead, they recommended using the term "deferred success"...
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