I'm Telling On You For Being Better!

Photographer unknown, from Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Life is often full of grey areas. Sports, to a degree, is an area that goes against this. In competitive leagues, only one thing ultimately matters: when the clock hits zero, which side's number is higher?

Whether I've developed credibility as a writer or not in the couple years since I started COAS or not, I did play competitive sports for a few years when I was younger. Those days are over, but the lessons they taught remain, and always will. And, like almost all athletes, the defeats my teams suffered taught us more than any victories ever did.

Between T-ball, basketball and soccer for the Fox Valley Park District, soccer and basketball for St. Paul's, and basketball for Aurora Christian, I played in a lot of games. My teams won our fair share, but we also lost plenty. And amongst those games were plenty of blowouts. I remember one season in Park District basketball where Nathaniel and I played together on a completely stacked team. We won our first two games by combined scores of 52-6 and 46-0 (how I remember these when I was like 10 at the time, I'll never know). And it's not like we kept the starters in the whole game. We had a 10-kid roster, and our coach rotated between two 5-man lineups over the course of the game. It's not like he was trying to run up the score; our team was just flat out better than everyone else.

I've been on the other side plenty of times too. My freshman year at Aurora Christian, I was one of about 10 or 11 guys. And we got our butts handed to us plenty of times. I remember in our first game we didn't score until midway through the third quarter. It was bad. But the other team didn't taunt us, and they did eventually call off the dogs and bring in the end of the bench. But we learned from it. Eventually, we got better as a team, and while we still weren't that great, we weren't that awful team that needed almost 20 minutes of game time to score.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that, when I heard news coming out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area yesterday... I was offended.

Photo by Bob Booth, special to the FW Star-Telegram

Undoubtedly by now you've heard about the blowout in Texas high school football from last weekend. Aledo High School, one of Texas' top 4A schools blew out one of the worse in Fort Worth's Western Hills High School by a score of 91-0. This outdoes any of the old ACS-Luther North/South football battles by a landslide. But it's not like it was intended that way. Aledo's starters barely played, with their coach going to the bench very early. This was also with the benefit of a running clock in the second half (similar to IHSA rules) and even going to the third and fourth string guys, with constant run plays called. They still couldn't muster anything.

For what it's worth, Western Hills' coach handled it about as gracefully as you could. With a 30 man roster, what more can you do? He lost with class, and while I'm sure the loss hurt, I hope his players can learn from it and be better this coming week.

Yet somehow, some parent decided that despite all this evidence that Aledo's coach Tim Buchanan did everything he could to avoid this, this was a case of "bullying".

Look, I don't mean to belittle the concept of bullying. It's a nasty issue in society that should be taken seriously when reported. And certainly some athletes do tend to be bullies, though not all of them are. But to consider a blowout loss "bullying" is an insult. Texas high school football is an institution. It's teenagers pouring all their effort into something they love, and many of them will never play after high school. Many of them rarely see the field. So to see Coach Buchanan call off the dogs when he did is a good thing. I'm sure he still feels bad about how the game ended up, but he got his backups some valuable experience, something that may come in handy later. He did all he could do to not insult his opponent or his own players.

Ultimately though, it comes down to this. Football is a competitive sport. There are winners and losers every Friday night under the lights. It's a fact of life. I have a number of trophies from my time playing Park District sports. How many of those would my teams have actually earned? Honestly... maybe only a couple, tops.

When you lose a game, it teaches you what you need to do better or how you can improve yourself and your team. And more importantly, it builds character. Those massive losses my teams suffered when I was in high school? Tough pills to swallow at the time, absolutely. But here I am today: a college graduate, out in the work force, getting married in less than eight months... and I'm not adversely impacted by losing a game ten years ago. I've said it before; I'll say it again: sports are not more important than life or death. Losing a football game 91-0 is not the end of the world.

As I sat down to finish this post this afternoon, I saw an updated story on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that said school district officials cleared Coach Buchanan and the school of any wrongdoing. I'm relieved common sense won this day. Blowouts happen. It's how you handle them that speaks to your character. And I'm glad that the coaches and players who handled it with great class and dignity won't be punished just because they were clearly the better team on a football field.