Going the Rounds
By Rick Anderson
Long before the running-clock mercy rule was adopted in high school football and basketball, a Grays Harbor prep football team won a game by a particularly lopsided margin.
A few days later, my phone rang in The Daily World office. The anonymous caller got right to the point.
Was I planning, he asked, to write a column denouncing the winning coach for running up the score?
I wasn’t, because I hadn’t covered the game in question. I was unaware of when the coach had begun substituting or such other mitigating factors as the number of defensive and special-teams touchdowns and one-play scoring “drives.”
In short, I didn’t have all the facts. As it turned out, neither did the caller. He admitted he hadn’t attended the game, but assumed the worst after seeing the score.
The same type of knee-jerk reaction accompanied last week’s 13-0 soccer victory by the United States over Thailand in the Women’s World Cup.
Blowouts in sports — and the motives of the people behind them — are frequently misunderstood.
Sometimes critics ignore pertinent facts. On other occasions, they mistakenly attempt to apply youth sportsmanship standards to adult competition.
A World Cup beatdown isn’t the same as pouring it on in a Pop Warner football game. For starters, World Cup rules limit substitutions. In addition, goal differential can be used to determine which teams advance. And the Americans, leading only 3-0 at the half, didn’t break things open until late in the contest.
The Americans were rightly taken to task for a few overly zealous celebrations of late goals. Nevertheless, those expressions of joy were nothing compared to the taunting and trash talking that are increasingly accepted in professional football and basketball.
Even at the high school level, the actions of winning coaches in blowouts frequently are more complicated than they appear.
Consider, for example, the case of former Elma High girls basketball coach Greg Hardie.
Coaching a succession of exceptionally talented Eagles teams led by all-state guard Jamie Craighead in the mid-1990s, Hardie unapologetically violated several unwritten rules of his profession.
Not only did he keep his starters on the court long after the outcome had been decided, but Hardie instructed the Eagles to continue their running, pressing style until virtually the final buzzer.
Hardie wasn’t playing to the pollsters or seeking to rewrite the school record book. His sole goal was to prepare Elma for state competition.
Correctly assuming that the Eagles wouldn’t receive much competition within their own league, Hardie insisted upon playing a rugged non-league schedule that almost guaranteed a loss or two. Beyond that, he wanted the starters to become accustomed to playing an up-tempo style for 32 minutes during the regular season, since they likely would be required to do so at state.
In theory, that philosophy made considerable sense. Nevertheless, there is a fine line between postseason preparation and opponent humiliation in youth sports. I can’t say I believed that the Eagles always stayed on the proper side of that line during the 1997-98 season, Craighead’s senior campaign.
Turning a potential 25-point victory into a 35-point triumph against a reasonably competitive opponent could be defended in keeping with Elma’s long-term goals. Keeping the accelerator down against an obviously overmatched and helpless foe, however, often seemed unnecessary — particularly when Eagle reserves could have received more playing time.
The 1997-98 season had an unexpected climax — and a strange and ironic third act.
After easily capturing league and district championships, the Eagle girls opened state 2A competition with a 45-point victory. But they fell to eventual state champ Lakeside of Nine Mile Falls in the quarterfinals and settled for a fourth-place trophy.
Hardie left Elma following that season. After coaching in California and North Carolina, he returned to the Northwest last year as the head girls coach at Genesee High School in Idaho and guided an unheralded team to a state runner-up finish during his first season at the helm.
Somewhat overshadowed by its female counterparts for much of the season despite a district title of its own, the 1997-98 Elma boys basketball team, meanwhile, did go on to win the state 2A championship. Elma’s 98-89 victory over a Blaine club that included future University of Oregon and Seattle SuperSonics guard Luke Ridnour remains one of the greatest title contests in state history.
Elma boys coach Tim Snodgrass, however, resigned under fire from boosters barely one year later. Although the circumstances behind his departure remain complex and somewhat murky, one of the booster complaints against Snodgrass was that he pulled his starters too quickly.
There’s probably a moral or two in this saga. But, like many things associated with coaching philosophies, those morals might well be too complicated to fully understand.
