a good firing
http://federalistpaupers.com/index.php/2…
The Covenant School is a small Catholic high school for ordinary students; the Dallas Academy is a school for learning disabled students… When the Covenant beat Dallas 100-0, a clearly embarassed Covenant fired their coach.
Sounds like the perfect call to me.
Schools have sports for the same reason that they have math classes: to teach students how to be functioning adults.
If the athletics teacher not only fails to do that, but teaches something actively perverse, then he should be out on his ass.
January 28th, 2009 at 11:58 am
I thought I heard on the radio that the coach of the opposing team, the one that lost, said he and his team would have been insulted had the winning coach and team held back.
January 28th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
I agree with Fred – I’ve been on both ends of rugby games with 80-point margins, and I would have been insulted if the teams that beat us like that had deliberately let us score, or blatantly given up on trying to score any more points.
Yeah, you pull your starters and put in all the reserves who haven’t had any playing time so far this year, but that doesn’t go as far on a 8- or 10-girl high-school basketball roster as it does on a 50-man high-school or NFL football team or a 40-man rugby team where the reserves are raw rookies and broken-down old fat veterans.
In a basketball game, you can stop the full-court press on defense, you can stop high-speed length-of-the-court offenses and ask the point guard to take her time bringing up the ball. You can stop taking 3-pointers. You can start having your shooters pass up shots to pass the ball and the shot to players who normally just play defense. But you can’t quit on defense, give away points, or stop shooting any offense at all.
I don’t know if the winners in this game did those things, or if they ran up the score to try and reach triple digits, but scoring 100 points isn’t incompatible with slowing things down and taking it easy – NBA games often have 100 points scored by BOTH teams, so you don’t have to be scoring as fast as you can to get to 100.
Maybe towards the end of the game the girls from the winning team could have started throwing obvious and not physically dangerous fouls at the other team to set up some free throws to prevent a shutout, but that could have come across as condescending, too.
January 28th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
he and his team would have been insulted had the winning coach and team held back.
If you look at the scores per quarter it appears they did slow down a bit. Or maybe they just put in their 2nd and 3rd team.
January 29th, 2009 at 12:26 am
After reading the coaches reply, and if his numbers are accurate, if was definitely in the wrong to fire him. I’ve been on teams on both sides of the blowout equation. You take your foot off the gas and don’t rub it in (which it appears they did) but that’s all you can do.
At the end of the day I would much rather an opponent go full out for the 60 minutes and score 150-0 on me than going out of their way to give us a basket. In either case I realize I’m far outclassed, but the team who’s playing hard shows they still respect me enough to play the game. The team who starts giving me passes so I can score is basically saying I’m the little cousin they have to entertain.
Note this depends on the level of the disability, if these kids were seriously disabled they they pretty much are the little cousin scenario, it sounds like it’s more ADHD special program cases.
January 31st, 2009 at 8:41 pm
The coach was not fired due to the blowout. In fact, as The Brian suggests, they did cut back on the full court press. The coach was fired for not being sorry that his team whomped the other one, actually.
February 1st, 2009 at 3:02 am
[quote comment="180457"]The coach was not fired due to the blowout. In fact, as The Brian suggests, they did cut back on the full court press. The coach was fired for not being sorry that his team whomped the other one, actually.[/quote]
But if he didn’t do anything wrong what is he supposed to apologize for?