Winning Will Get You Fired!

January 26, 2009 by Jeremy.

Girls Basketball Coach Fired After 100-0 Win

This is so stupid! I am not one for running up the score, but I am also not one to hold back either. The coach probably could have done more to hold the score down, but firing him for getting his team to play well is absurd. Winning and losing is part of life! You can learn something from both outcomes.

I wen to a private school and was Manager of our Basketball team. We had a game where we played a newly formed team that was not very good. We blew them out of the water even while trying to limit the score. Their coach got mad and called our school and told (not asked) us that we should play our JV team next time against their Varsity team. Our coach, against my advice, agreed to their terms and we lost. He never did that again.

Participating in sports is about doing the best you can and if you fail then you just try to make yourself better. I would never tell my team not to do their best because that is not the right thing to be teaching them. I would tell them to have good attitudes about it though.

I do think that the fans should not have been so excited abotu getting to 100 points because it was obviously not that great of an accomplishment considering the other team scored no points at all. There is a balance to be found here, but firing a coach for getting his team to do their best is not the answer.

“On its Web site last week, Covenant, a private Christian school, posted a statement regretting the outcome of its Jan. 13 shutout win over Dallas Academy. “It is shameful and an embarrassment that this happened. This clearly does not reflect a Christlike and honorable approach to competition,” said the statement, signed by Queal and board chair Todd Doshier.”

There is nothing Un-Christlike or dishonorable about doing your best as long as it is done with a humble attitude. If the better team was bragging or being rude about it then that is a different story. That does not seem to be the case here though.

We live in a society where (even in our churches) everyone has to be equal and no one is allowed to lose. This is the same reason you see schools that don’t want to give kids harsh grades or even tell them that hey are wrong. I believe that we learn far more from failure than we doing from winning and that will be valuable to our daily lives and that’s how the story should have ended. We should be encouraging the other team to do better and work harder and come back next time and play a better game. We should not hold one team back so the other team does not feel bad.

That is not Christian and it is not Common Sense!

Posted in Jeremy, Coherent Thoughts, Current Events | Print | 2 Comments »