Sore losers

[Dannyalcatraz]

Lets take it back to the original setting: a HS football game, with players ranging from 14-19. One team was simply better. The winning coach did everything within his power to avoid running up the score except punting on 1st down. Doing that would have been detrimental to the enjoyment of participation that this own team's bench-warmers would rarely get. Some of those kids may only play about 6 quarters of game play over the course of the season.

Some of the players on the losing team may also be among the 1% of 1% who may actually go pro. Not likely, but possible. The NFL. Has no mercy rule. Lets say they end up on a team that is worse than the Giants, Jaguars or Buccaneers of this season*...the worst team of the new century. Without ever experiencing something like this loss, will they be able to handle an analogous loss in national TV? Nobody is going to pull their punches on the next day's rehash. And heaven forfend said worst team is in a market like NY, Boston or Philly, where the press can be notoriously harsh.

Clearly, one of these football teams- if not both- were playing in the wrong division...at least, this year. The winning team may be so "elite" that a division with the proper level of competitiveness does not exist outside of the state championship games.

And 5 years from now, they could be on the receiving end of such a loss.

(In the 1980s my college FB team was so bad, we sold off part of the stadium to a local HS. In the 1990s, they won a couple of National Championships in their division.)

The answer isn't to remove the possibility of abject failure. The answer is to have a system that deals with it if and when it occurs. Make it administratively easier for teams to change divisions...and have administrators who can do the job of assessing which team belongs in which division as well.

And make the schools responsible for doing a proper "talent" assessment as well. We don't need schools choosing to play in a lesser division in order to be the "big fish in a small pond." Or setting their charges up for a season of failure because you thought you might be able to take a couple of games in the higher divisions.

Besides, are kids more vulnerable to emotional trauma than adults? If so, isn't it largely because they lack the experience most adults have from being exposed to emotionally traumatic experiences in childhood?

My gut feeling leads me to believe this is mostly ttrue. Yeah, there may be an innate baseline for handling trauma, but life teaches us how to deal with greater amounts. But to do so requires a world that allows for risk of being hurt.




* Actually, there was a discussion along these lines tonight on ESPN, with a panel of former NFL stars discussing the collapse of Tampa Bay, centering on the difference between those teammates who could take a loss like tonight's- in the context of their crappy season thus far- and those who would simply surrender on the season and their team. Unanimously, they talked about the rarity of the former, and the ubiquity of the latter.

 

[jasper]

Squirrel the lesson is, some days you going get "pwwned" in the game and the rules will not allow you dashboard.
As to the team being in a different division. That be update to state rules ( there that word again) on what is division, and what is the school's region of play.
The unfair/"bullying" bs comes up in my state occasionally and is generally dismiss. It is dismissed because most of us recognize if you 1 city with 3 high schools vs a county with 1 high school, the city boys are generally going to win due greater pool of better players.

 

[Zombie_Babies]

My now 9 years old son has played soccer since he was 5 years old. Two seasons per year, (spring & fall). The first few seasons the score was not "officially" kept. The idea was that the kids are just learning the game; playing was really just training & practice. But the kids, every one, kept track and knew the score of every game they played. They knew when they won and lost, all on their own, without parents saying anything. Not keeping an official score was not to protect anyone's feelings, it was because the games were really just fundamentals training.

The last two seasons, there was an official score and even a tournament at the end of the season. There was no scoreboard or written record of the score shown anywhere, but again, still, the kids knew the scores.

The scores ranged anywhere from very close, like 3-3, to wide, like 8-1. No one got upset, no kid cried, no parent got angry. Couple hundred kids and parents, and nothing but good manners all around.

He also played a couple extra seasons on an indoor soccer league. In the beginning of one of the indoor seasons, the league official judged his team to be better than his age bracket, and so moved them up. The opposing teams in the upper bracket were full of kids head and shoulders taller than our kids. The game scores were close, but we parents worried about injuries. 7 year old kids playing against 9 year old kids -- a collision, or a ball to the face could be dangerous. There were a couple of accidents that got gasps from the parents on the bleachers. After the first two games, we talked the officials into letting our kids go back down to their age bracket, for safety.

In their own age bracket, our team dominated. I'm talking 20-0 score domination, (in soccer!). We parents admitted to being a bit embarrassed. Sadly, sometimes the other team would have only 4-5 kids, (of 10 total), show up for a game. Our team always had 8-9 show up every game. After a couple of games, our coaches, (volunteer parents), would lend the other teams some of our players to even out the skill level, and to give the other team players time to rest.

Through all of that, still no kid cried and no parent got angry. Everyone was a good sport about all of it.

So remember, for every news item and every apocryphal anecdote you've read or heard, there are thousands and thousands of kids and parents who handle playing, winning, and losing at various sports just fine.

But trophies: some kind of participation award is ok, but a real trophy should be only for winning something major. Here is more of my experience and opinion on kids' trophies.

Bullgrit

This would be a lovely example of what I'm talking about ... if it weren't about soccer.

 

[Zombie_Babies]

Well, sometimes the consequences may be light. Getting beaten in a game isn't too bad. A 91-0 score is more like being humiliated. And that also has consequences that aren't light.
Whether this particular incident was a case of bullying, I can't say. I don't think it is. The coach of the team that won said he put in his third string players. So it doesn't appear that he was trying to run up the score. Then again, there is the possibility that he put in his third string and was saying things to the players on the field. There's no proof from the article that he did, but it's possible. In any case, I think this is more of a failure of the system. The NCAA doesn't seem to have a mercy rule. They should have. The article mentioned that the high school sports commission, or whatever the association is called, has a rule where the game would have been stopped if there was a 30 to 50 point difference. It was a failure of the losing team's coach for not stopping the game. He could have decided to take his team off the field and forfeited the game. And the losing team's school also failed because, at least according to the winning team's coach, they don't put the money into their football program.

There is plenty of blame to go around for this massacre of a game. There are a lot of things they can do to fix these problems without taking away score keeping, which was never even discussed in the article, so I'm a bit confused as to why that was being discussed. Also, it's understandable why a parent would be upset that this happened. No one likes to see their kids get beat. No one really wants to see their kids get humiliated this bad. And really, what are the kids going to learn from being beaten in a 91-0 game?

Yep, the biggest issue here is that an actually good team was moved to a division that doesn't have any teams of the same talent level. That's the problem.

The NCAA, by the way, will never institute a mercy rule. People watch their big name teams destroy FBS competition on network TV. The revenue is just too high to risk an early stoppage. Luckily, though, this may soon be a thing of the past. The Big 10 (of all conferences) was the first to announce it's phasing out playing FBS teams and basically eliminating the 'tune up' phase of the season. They will schedule more appropriate opponents from better conferences. This is gonna happen soon, too. The other conferences are going to follow suit. So, the odds of a total beatdown will decrease somewhat soon. Of course, this could also mean the end of college football as we know it since these terrible schools actually get paid a lot of money to take a beating from a Big 6 juggernaut. Like, a lot of money. Like, it's what keeps a lot of these programs going. So, there's some bad with the good. Oh well.

 

[Robin Hoodlum]

But think of the children!
If we don't let everybody win, that means somebody has to lose.
And we can't have children losing! Why, that would make them feel like losers! And that would hurt their feelings!
Best if we just let them win all the time so they don't have to deal with failure and all the emotions that brings.
*rolls eyes*

 

[Zombie_Babies]

I won't say you're wrong, but it will be hard for the administration to cut a program that was ranked in the top 100 just 2 years ago. They're more likely to try to epweather the storm- many HBCUs are struggling right now. Some of it is politics, some of it is changing demographics. And other stuff.

Bro? Top 100? There's, like, 120 teams in their division.

 

[Homicidal_Squirrel]

Lets take it back to the original setting: a HS football game, with players ranging from 14-19. One team was simply better. The winning coach did everything within his power to avoid running up the score except punting on 1st down. Doing that would have been detrimental to the enjoyment of participation that this own team's bench-warmers would rarely get. Some of those kids may only play about 6 quarters of game play over the course of the season.

Some of the players on the losing team may also be among the 1% of 1% who may actually go pro. Not likely, but possible. The NFL. Has no mercy rule. Lets say they end up on a team that is worse than the Giants, Jaguars or Buccaneers of this season*...the worst team of the new century. Without ever experiencing something like this loss, will they be able to handle an analogous loss in national TV? Nobody is going to pull their punches on the next day's rehash. And heaven forfend said worst team is in a market like NY, Boston or Philly, where the press can be notoriously harsh.

Clearly, one of these football teams- if not both- were playing in the wrong division...at least, this year. The winning team may be so "elite" that a division with the proper level of competitiveness does not exist outside of the state championship games.

And 5 years from now, they could be on the receiving end of such a loss.

(In the 1980s my college FB team was so bad, we sold off part of the stadium to a local HS. In the 1990s, they won a couple of National Championships in their division.)

The answer isn't to remove the possibility of abject failure. The answer is to have a system that deals with it if and when it occurs. Make it administratively easier for teams to change divisions...and have administrators who can do the job of assessing which team belongs in which division as well.

And make the schools responsible for doing a proper "talent" assessment as well. We don't need schools choosing to play in a lesser division in order to be the "big fish in a small pond." Or setting their charges up for a season of failure because you thought you might be able to take a couple of games in the higher divisions.

Besides, are kids more vulnerable to emotional trauma than adults? If so, isn't it largely because they lack the experience most adults have from being exposed to emotionally traumatic experiences in childhood?

My gut feeling leads me to believe this is mostly ttrue. Yeah, there may be an innate baseline for handling trauma, but life teaches us how to deal with greater amounts. But to do so requires a world that allows for risk of being hurt.




* Actually, there was a discussion along these lines tonight on ESPN, with a panel of former NFL stars discussing the collapse of Tampa Bay, centering on the difference between those teammates who could take a loss like tonight's- in the context of their crappy season thus far- and those who would simply surrender on the season and their team. Unanimously, they talked about the rarity of the former, and the ubiquity of the latter.

Lovely story, but here is the thing; you don't have to be humiliated to learn how to deal with a big loss. How may people go to school and never play in any sport? Do they all turn out to whimpering adults that are as delicate as a snow flake? No, they don't. As I said, there are other ways that are far better to teach people how to deal with losing.
Even those kids that do play sports, how much humiliation is required for them to learn? is 40-0 not enough? 50-0? 100-0? What with the need to humiliate people to such an extent? I mean, if you really think that they need to be humiliated to such an extent, maybe there should be a rule that the winning team gets to teabag the losing team and the coach.

 

[Homicidal_Squirrel]

Yep, the biggest issue here is that an actually good team was moved to a division that doesn't have any teams of the same talent level. That's the problem.

The NCAA, by the way, will never institute a mercy rule. People watch their big name teams destroy FBS competition on network TV. The revenue is just too high to risk an early stoppage. Luckily, though, this may soon be a thing of the past. The Big 10 (of all conferences) was the first to announce it's phasing out playing FBS teams and basically eliminating the 'tune up' phase of the season. They will schedule more appropriate opponents from better conferences. This is gonna happen soon, too. The other conferences are going to follow suit. So, the odds of a total beatdown will decrease somewhat soon. Of course, this could also mean the end of college football as we know it since these terrible schools actually get paid a lot of money to take a beating from a Big 6 juggernaut. Like, a lot of money. Like, it's what keeps a lot of these programs going. So, there's some bad with the good. Oh well.

The end of college football ruled by the NCAA isn't a bad thing.

 

[Homicidal_Squirrel]

Squirrel the lesson is, some days you going get "pwwned" in the game and the rules will not allow you dashboard.

So what? is 40-0 not enough of a loss? The idea that you have to be humiliated to learn that "some days you're going to get 'pwwned'" is stupid. Plenty of people learn that lesson without having to be humiliated. Really, this idea that you have to humiliate kids to teach them is stupid. Also, is dealing with humiliation the only lesson kids participating in sports are supposed to learn?

 

[Zombie_Babies]

The end of college football ruled by the NCAA isn't a bad thing.

Preach on. This playoff thing, though, seems to be a total farce. Lots of sexist comments about Condi being on board, too. Lame.

Anyhoo, the main issue with this is that some programs may be totally lost since the schools will probably no longer be able to afford to have them. That means less talent in the pool - and yes, kids from lower tier schools do get drafted and do play well. They may never get that chance if the little schools lose their teams. Could be a ripple effect that hurts the NFL.Maybe if they just split the two into divisions that never cross it'd work. Lesser expectations means less money required to compete maybe, I dunno.