Blowout in Michigan

[Ytown Tribe fan]

This is one of those articles that's supposed to make you hate a winning coach. I found it on ESPN.com, and I'm sure many of you have read it.

...

DETROIT -- Walkerville 115, Lakeshore 2.

And it could have been worse. A lot worse.

"What do you tell our girls? Not to play?" Walkerville High athletics director Ron Stoneman said Wednesday, a day after his state-ranked school stomped winless Hart Lakeshore Public Academy in a girls basketball playoff game.

"It had the potential to be really, really bad."

The blowout left Lakeshore academics director Steve Hamilton seething about a lack of sportsmanship.

"To me, if you run up the score like that, you have to answer for yourself," Hamilton said. "I have my doubts about a school that would go and run up a school by 100 points."

Walkerville coach Steve Kirwin said he doesn't schedule teams like Lakeshore, which has a student body of 50 in grades nine through 12, during the regular season. But during the playoffs, "You play who they tell you to play."

Kirwin said he promoted girls from the junior varsity and freshmen teams, and did not use his normal pressure defense against overmatched Lakeshore.

By halftime, Kirwin said, three girls hadn't scored. So he said only they could shoot. But after they scored, then what?

"I'm not going to tell my kids to not continue to play," Kirwin said. "It's not that we wanted to score a ton of points."

Both Walkerville and Lakeshore noted that the Michigan High School Athletic Association did away with a differential rule during the offseason. Under the old rule, the clock ran continuously if a team built a 40-point lead in the second half and maintained at least a 30-point advantage.

MHSAA assistant director Nate Hampton said the association dropped the rule to meet guidelines set by the National Federation of State High School Associations.

Hampton said the rule helped spare teams from embarrassment or humiliation but added that "coaching tactics or strategies" can be used instead.

A 115-2 score "is what we've been guarding against the last several years," Hampton said.

...

The article left me with some questions:

1) What is a winless team doing in a state playoff game? Is this "feel-good" education at its worst? Are the playoffs now the same as "everyone wins a medal day" at summer camp? Or was this a tourney?

2) Don't they have divisions in Michigan? What is a state-ranked school doing playing a winless team from a tiny school?

3) What should the winning coach have done? He started freshmen and scrubs anyway, only let three girls shoot in the second half -- the three girls who hadn't scored in the first half. Should he have played three girls at a time only, and won by 50 or 60 instead and REALLy showed up the other team?


This was a game that never should have been played and the state athletic body that sanctioned it should take ALL the heat.

[SmedIndy]

Michigan certainly has class sports - and if they're like Indiana everyone goes to the state tournament. And there's nothing wrong with that at all. It's a much better system than trying to pick the teams - everyone is in - no complaints.

The beauty of the old Indiana HS tourney was that everyone went - everyone had a chance - and everyone was in one class. There was no "feel good" part of it. You played the schools in your area, and if you beat them you advanced.

Sometimes these things happen - I much rather prefer the old tourney in Indiana than the new class tournament. No one goes now; it used to be that the sectionals (which cut the field from 380+ teams to 64) would be packed - the regionals would be a sellout - and the semi-state would have scalpers.

I saw a regular season game score in girls basketball here where it was 101-8. It was a class 2A school losing to a class A (the smallest) school.

One of the big arguements for the proponents of class basketball in Indiana was that you would eliminate super-blowouts. Looking at this story - that's totally false.

[pwdennis]

I too, question what is going on in Michigan sports.

The old Indiana open tournament that Smed misses so much was a great idea in theory but not in reality. The great upset depicted in the classic film HOOSIERS occurred a long time ago under grotesquely different circumstances:

Except in Indiana and a few other pockets, basketball was a distinctly minor sport that didn't usually attract the top athletes

The game was much slower, with the the rules against traveling, palming (double dribble), et cetera actually being enforced.

The game was imperfectly integrated. Moreover, the professional game was was little more than than a traveling carnival or floating craps game. It was not every poor black kid's ticket out of poverty.

The worst basketball players today are better than their 1950 counterparts but the best players are far better, not to mention faster, taller and stronger and better coached. Here in Florida when smaller schools play the larger schools, the larger schools almost always prevail, often by wearing down the smaller school by superior depth.

As for Smeds cited blowout of a larger school by a smaller school, no doubt this can still happen, but I am not aware of the size disparity of the various size school classifications in Indiana. In a heavily urban state like Florida or New York, the size gap can be staggering. I'd guarantee you that Smed's class one school would get slaughtered playing Florida larger schools

[WiredTiger]

You definitely do have classes in Michigan sports and I believe everyone makes it to the playoffs for basketball. They do have seperate touraments for the different classes but you have schools in Michigan that are 3000 students and in the lowest class there can be some pretty big differentials in class size.

I did some quick research and Lakeshore seems to be a Charter school. Some of these Charter (semi-Public) schools can be very small. A student body of 50 is very small for Michigan and they could be in the lowest class and still face schools that are 5 times as big.

I may be in the minority but I think there is a big difference between running up the score and playing a good game versus an inferior opponent. The coach in this case didn't press, put in players that weren't normally on the varsity team and designated that only certain people could score. The other team was clearly outmatched and there wasn't much the coach could do about it. I am not one for puposely playing poorly to keep the score low and this coach was trying to get his team ready for the rest of the playoffs. I think if this coach wanted to the score could have been 200-2.

[SmedIndy]

PW -

I am not saying that a small school would beat a large school all the time. However, in the 70's schools like Loogootee and Argos (tiny schools of 150 - 200 students) made the state finals, beating larger urban schools in South Bend and Evansville.

Ironically, the last tournament ever of single class - girls softball - Turkey Run High School (enrollment 275 for four grades on a good year) won the state title, beating behemoth Center Grove (1,500 enrollment in 3 grades).

The point I was making is that the proponents of class sports said blowouts would diminish - they have not.

[TGwynn19]

This is nothing new to me. When I was a freshman in HS our BB team was horrible. In regular season conference play we lost by over 100 points TWICE. Our average loss was by 44 points. Our starting point guard averaged 14 turnovers a game.

In HS sports these kind of outcomes can happen.

[Ytown Tribe fan]

In my freshman year, our high school football team scored 9 points -- in 9 games. The worst defeat was 50-0, most were closer. The coach never complained and the defense gave strong efforts nearly every week. They finished 3-6 the next year, but they have never been a playoff team. In Ohio, the top 8 football teams in each division/region make the playoffs -- and there are still blowouts.

I guess this story really tells me more about the losing coach than anything -- he really didn't have a right to complain, but may have felt that he had a DUTY to complain -- his girls were winless and this playoff game was the last of the year for them -- and it's just the luck of the draw that he didn't draw someone they could at least contend against.

[Craig S.]

I think YTF said it well in his last post. The losing coach simply felt he had an obligation to complain. No matter what type of divisions or conferences you come up with, games like this will occur. They are extremely rare, but they always get talked about and blown out of proportion when they happen.

Do we need complete parity at every level of every sport? And it's not like every game is 100-2. I think this whole article is much ado about nothing.

[SmedIndy]

It's funny though - one year in freshman basketball - one team used to press all the time on defense (because their varsity team pressed all the time) and by half had rung up a 30+ point lead on another team that was short handed.

The coaches - who knew each other - talked at the half - the winning coach said he was going to call off the press - but the other coach said not to, because the kids needed to learn how to break presses and the only way was to keep facing them. It wound up a 50 point game - but at least it was a teaching moment.

[gyb13]

getting your ass wooped stinks. but you gotta teach your players to learn from it. what was it about the other team that was so good and how can we emulate that?