An Experiment in Scotch

By now, I would imag­ine that most peo­ple around the coun­try who are tuned into news at all have heard about the 100–0 butt kick­ing that the Covenant School of Dal­las’ girls bas­ket­ball team put on Dal­las Acad­emy last week. Now, Covenant fired their coach over the affair which I find to be the most ridicu­lous, asi­nine thing they could have done. Instead of stand­ing by their coach and team, they are grov­el­ing before the pub­lic, mak­ing an already awk­ward sit­u­a­tion worse. Appar­ently, they even apol­o­gized for win­ning the game:

“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 Kyle Queal, head of school, and board chair Todd Doshier.

Unfor­tu­nately, these two fel­lows don’t seem to under­stand that a Christ­like approach to com­pe­ti­tion is an oxy­moron. Christ said “Turn the other cheek” not beat the other team into sub­mis­sion. The two con­cepts just don’t jive. The point of com­pe­ti­tion is to play hard and win. Com­pe­ti­tion isn’t about mak­ing both teams feel OK about their self-worth, it’s not about spread­ing a Christ­like atti­tude, it’s not about giv­ing every­one the oppor­tu­nity to con­tribute. Com­pe­ti­tion is about two things: play­ing hard and winning.

On the other side of this story, we have Dal­las acad­emy and their idi­otic admin­is­tra­tion. If you field a team that can’t win a damn bas­ket­ball game in 4 years and you can’t man­age to even score a sin­gle point in a full game, you shouldn’t be play­ing at that level, if at all. Sorry, but this is the state we’ve come to today where peo­ple seem to think that every­one deserves an oppor­tu­nity. Guess what, not every­one deserves to play var­sity bas­ket­ball. This quote from the Dal­las Acad­emy coach in the Dal­las Morn­ing News is telling:

“Most of these girls would never play on any other school in the state,” he said. “But they can say they were high school var­sity play­ers here. And they can say it with a sense of achievement.”

What sense of achieve­ment can they get from los­ing every game for 4 straight years? The achieve­ment of becom­ing really good losers? What good could come of this, of field­ing a team for 4 sea­sons that reg­u­larly doesn’t score dou­ble digit points? There is noth­ing in human rights that says every­one has the right to do what­ever they want, even if they are ter­ri­ble at it. If you want to give girls who can’t pos­si­bly play bas­ket­ball on any other team in the entire state the chance to play bas­ket­ball then you fully deserve any result that might occur includ­ing get­ting beaten 100–0. You have no right to expect the other team to be a part of your com­plic­ity in doing some­thing stupid.

As much or more blame for this entire fiasco falls on Dal­las Acad­emy and its admin­is­tra­tion. They are the ones who should be fired for being so bone­headed as to not see a result like this. They insisted on field­ing a sham of a team and insisted on play­ing supe­rior oppo­nents. This result was prac­ti­cally a fore­gone con­clu­sion at some point. Yet, they will receive no con­dem­na­tion for it as we live in a world where the win­ners are often pun­ished far more severely than the losers.