After a 100-0 win in a girl’s basketball match, the [Christian] Covenant High School in Dallas issued a statement apologizing:
“It is shameful and an embarrassment that this happened. This clearly does not reflect a Christlike and honorable approach to competition.“
The team coach issued his own statement:
“In response to the statement posted on The Covenant School Web site, I do not agree with the apology or the notion that the Covenant School girls basketball team should feel embarrassed or ashamed. We played the game as it was meant to be played. My values and my beliefs would not allow me to run up the score on any opponent, and it will not allow me to apologize for a wide-margin victory when my girls played with honor and integrity.“
The coach was fired.
This is an interesting philosophical issue: Given that basketball rules state nothing about avoiding large-margin victories (the team played the game as “it was meant to be played”), is the winning team under obligation to avoid a humiliating victory?
My opinion is that this really depends on who is playing and the expectations for the game:
- If I am playing basketball against a 6-year old child, I have a clear obligation not to win by a large margin (and probably not to win at all). This holiday, I let several young family members beat me at musical chairs, for example.
- If teenagers play a game with the expectation that it is a competitive game, I don’t see an obligation to hold back. At least lacking any shared expectation or convention that large victories should be avoided.
Here is a way of illustrating the conundrum:
In my forthcoming book on casual games (“A Casual Revolution”), I propose that playing a multiplayer game is to balance three different ways of framing a game:
- Seeing a game as goal orientation means that players should try to win (also by as large a margin as possible).
- Seeing a game as experience means that players should try to keep the game interesting by creating some uncertainty about the outcome.
- Seeing a game as a way to manage the social situation will mean that you will have to play somewhat badly in order not to win against a fragile child or your boss if you believe this will have negative repercussion.
The discussion around the 100-0 game is pretty straightforward then: The Covenant team and coach focused on frame 1 – trying to win, but critics claim that they should have focused more on frame 3 – managing the social situation by making sure that the other team did not feel humiliated. (The critics overlooking the fact that if the Covenant team had openly played badly, this would have been deeply condescending and humiliating as well.)
The frustration of the coach (and the team presumably) comes from the fact that two mutually contradictory things are asked from them:
1. They are asked to produce convincing victories, thereby making their school and community proud of them.
3. But critics allege that they should also be careful not to produce too convincing victories.
The whole issue stems from the fact that the Covenant school is unresolved about what it is asking from its sports team. Does the school want them to win (frame 1) or to be nice (frame 3)?
With contradictory expectations and in the absence of any guideline for navigating between the two, this is what happens.
Full story at ESPN. Opinion piece. (Via Philosophy of Sport which also has a discussion).
At a certain point in a blowout, the game can no longer be considered competitive. In this situation, the game has become imbalanced (for whatever reason) to a point where it’s more like your example of playing musical chairs than any kind of serious competitive contest.
The typical response to this situation is to subordinate Frames 1 (winning an uncontested contest satisfies no one) and 2 (running up the score on a helpless opponent is not interesting), and focusing on Frame 3 — trying to minimize embarrassment for everyone involved by dialing things down a bit.
If Covenant’s coach was somehow unable to read the situation during the game, he probably should have gotten the hint afterwards, when everyone was pointing out that his opponents were a team that hadn’t won a game four seasons, fielded only eight girls, and came from a school that specializes in teaching children with learning disabilities.
It´s hard to feel sorry for the guy when you take into account that he chose to work at a Christian school.
Joshlee, but don’t you think that the losing team was aware of the rules they were playing by? And isn’t it even more humiliating to be told that, “hey, we won’t seriously try to play against you since you all have learning disabilities”?
Patrick: Well, I am not sure there is any good theological backup for the school board’s claim that it is un-Christlike to win by large margin, so it wasn’t clear what the coach was getting himself into.
Interesting. And what about cases when trying to avoid a shutout costs you the win? Sometimes you are playing against someone bad enough to crush, but good enough that if you give them some leeway they will catch up with you.
@Jesper’s response to Joshlee:
Clearly telling your opponent you don’t take them seriously is also unsportsmanlike. I see where you’re going with this–the point is to make the losing team believe the winners had to work for their victory. Or at least to let them pretend, maybe ascribe the outcome to luck rather than a gulf between their skill levels.
Contained within these expectations is the belief that losing is devastating (and, it seems, that winning is wonderful and more important than anything else). So ironically enough, because winning is so important, one shouldn’t try too hard to win. All this reaffirms the idea that losing is a terrible experience in the minds of the players.
And thus we are able to pretend there is no one significantly better than us at the game.
If you discover that the opposing basketball team is really hopelessly outclassed by your own, just ask yourself the question: “What would Jesus do?”.
Jesper, I think the context of play is a very significant part of what kind of game you have, and also what ‘winning’ might mean. When you deliberately lose at musical chairs to some children, you are as it were, winning the larger game (investing in a relationship with your younger family members).
Consider this threat/promise: “If you get to level 5 on Ms. PacMan, I won’t kill you.” What kind of game would that be?
But also, has anyone here decided to deliberately lose a chess game because after a while you just got a bit bored with it. Are there similar ethics involved?
This is like the stanford prison experiment. The coach himself didn’t score any points, it was the people in the team that did it. However, the coach is responsible for the environment in which those players performed.
He might have told them a number of things to propagate extreme competitiveness, considering there was clearly no reason to feel aggressively competitive or raise the performance to that level. I can see a situation in which He could have said, after realizing that it was a landslide, that “Girls, even though we will win, we lose in spirit if we get scored on just once.”
One solution to satisfy the conundrum: to let the players know that he was removing himself from running any “plays” or strategy; prevent the game to be a dummy “practice”, and let each player determine their level of sympathy towards the other school’s players. He could have told one of his players to be coach…
Also, why the comparison with musical chairs? there’s no score in musical chairs… no teams, no procedural strategy (first do this then that, iterate), etc. One kid game analogue to basketball is dodge ball, where simple social rules exist even in that maturity level (don’t throw at the face, big/slow kids awareness, fouls, stepping out of bounds, etc…), strategies, blocking, physicality…
Anyway, unless the media presents more details about all the things the coach did in the game to be I think that the situation isn’t so ambiguous considering the possibilities he could have done to play competitively and still let all players enjoy playing the game. He should be fired so his attitude towards winning can be better utilized by teams that solely behave in that competitive manner; History for consideration: Will Chaimberlan’s 100 point game, Bill Russell vs the rest, etc.
Heh, blame, guilt and and moralizing are funny things. Not things I’m terribly interested in actually; much more interested in what the steps afterwards should be.
A few options:
* winners apologize to losers
* sack winning coach
* give ref power to end games prematurely
* add skunk rule
* remove losing team from league play
Since I’m coming from a designer’s viewpoint, adding a skunk rule is what I’d be interested in doing
if the winning team took it easy, and lost, I wonder if they’d be in the news for a different reason?
http://www.chessvibes.com/reports/9-year-old-indian-beats-a-gm/
I used to play basketball in my youth and
once we lost 199-18 (yes, one-nine-nine).
I don’t remember anybody being fired nor
issuing any excuse. But I guess this happens
when politically correctness reaches the absurd
levels of nowadays…
p.s. at the end of the game. they didn’t reach 200
only because I elbowed the one player that was
going to shoot an make it… ;-)
“[D]on’t you think that the losing team was aware of the rules they were playing by? And isn’t it even more humiliating to be told that, “hey, we won’t seriously try to play against you since you all have learning disabilities”?”
By all means, play seriously against them — for say, the first half or so. But once you’re up, say 50-0 to nothing, it’s pretty clear to all involved that there is no “serious” chance of the other team winning the game. In that situation, it becomes obvious that one team so far outclasses the other that the situation is more like dunking on the six year old than the 96 Bulls blowing out the Wizards. And whereas the Bull and the Wizards are both (supposedly, anyway) comprised of highly talented, highly paid individuals competing in a league with a salary cap in place to ensure rough competative parity, the players in this instance were amatures, kids, competing in a small schools league, where wide disparities in amount of funds and size of talent pool between teams are commonplace. Whether the kids had learning disabilities has nothing to do with it.