Play Fair, Win With Humility, Lose With Integrity

I know most of my posts on here deal with major sports stories about who's who and what's going on in the world of sports (I even said so myself in a Beacon News article posted last week), but I do need to come to the forefront when things unfold like they did in Peoria yesterday.

At work this morning I saw an article on the Tribune's website about the Class 2A Boys' Basketball Championship game and took note of a peculiar headline about the losing team, Seton Academy, refusing its second place trophy. Based purely off the headline, I wasn't quite sure what to think, though reading the article answered a lot of questions. More on that in a moment.

As a sports fan who has maybe too much of a competitive nature (thankfully not to Michael Jordan's extent), in and of itself I don't necessarily mind seeing a team refuse to accept a trophy that isn't for a championship, though the context does somewhat override this. I'm personally not a big fan of the "Everyone gets a trophy!" mentality that seems prevalent in society today, though this isn't the case in the IHSA. You get a plaque for winning smaller tournaments at regional and sectional sites, and then if you make the Top 4 you get a trophy. In order to get one though, that requires 5 or 6 straight wins, and it's hard. In my four years at Aurora Christian, we only won one regional (my senior year, the year I predicted we'd at least get that far) and fell just short against Byron for a sectional title. It was very disappointing, given that I was a senior and that was the end of my direct involvement in ACS basketball, but I was proud to be part of that group of guys that added to ACS lore (as head coach Don Davidson put it, "Good teams play in March," and the sectional title game was in March. We fit the bill.) Had we advanced beyond that, I would have been more than happy to hold a trophy of some kind had we made it to state, even if it was only a 4th place trophy.

Then I read the Tribune article.

In what I think could be safely called a disgusting show of (lack of) sportsmanship, Seton Academy left the floor following their defeat at the hands of Harrisburg with Seton coach Brandon Thomas getting into it with fans behind his bench, tossing away his medal and escaping without accepting the 2nd place trophy or talking to the media. You should take what you earned and work harder to go higher next time.

Put in context, this makes it even more disgusting and makes me understand (and maybe even agree with) calls for Thomas' firing from coaching.

This was a clip taken from last night's game, and one of two things seems to ring true: either Mark Weems, Jr. learned from his coach about "sportsmanship", or he's a good kid who just made an incredibly dumb decision. From what I've read (you can see in the comments below), things had gotten a little heated earlier in the game, but(contrary to what some of the people in the comments say) this was an entirely justified decision by the officials.

I was taught early on that you need to respect your opponents as well as the officials, and it's an IHSA rule that contact with officials WILL get you ejected. This isn't a race issue; this is, at best, a heat of the moment mistake and at worst, an indication of poor values taught to these kids. And if Weems was "baited" into the technical as the officials said, Harrisburg deserves a lot of blame too given the accusations that are flying around.

You don't have to be happy about a loss or about a call going your way, but you have to put things in perspective and keep yourself under control. Officials are human and will make mistakes from time to time. It's what you do when things don't go your way that defines you as an athlete and as a person. We learn more from our defeats than from our victories. My hope for these Seton kids is they learn to keep their cool when things don't go your way, and that you have to put in the effort to bounce back from adversity, not act like a petulant child when you don't get your way. I also hope the accusations some are making against Harrisburg aren't true, and if they are, that they are dealt with appropriately. And hopefully the IHSA can turn this into a learning moment for both sides, given their statement about what transpired.