Student Sections and the Misguided Notions of Sportsmanship

Hang on, I had just put my soapbox away. Now I've found something that requires me to drag it out again.

Please note in advance: this post will contain a little bit of NSFW language. As such, I'm putting in a jump here so that you can't read the NSFW content from the home page, but you will if you click on the link to this post itself and read it in its entirety. Normally, I wouldn't even put something in about this, but it's integral to the story and, believe it or not, I support its use both in its original context as well as in my own opinion on this story. You've been warned.

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.

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.