To Score or Not to Score?

There is no worse feeling than losing "a whole lot" to "a little." Or is there?

After watching a few different Cerritos teams play much weaker competition, a dilemma was posed inside my head. Each game that I watched was a blowout, no question about it. But, each team handled how it went about playing its game differently.

For example, when the women's soccer team (then ranked number 4 in the nation) went up against Compton (in its inaugural season), it never slowed down and kept playing as if the score were perpetually 0-0. The second string was brought in and continued to do the same. Then the third string. The lone striker for Compton was even man-marked throughout the second half, because that was something that needed to be practiced for the next game. The score ended 8-0 in favor of Cerritos, but after talking to the Compton coach, it was clear she was pretty happy with the results.

Now, that game is in comparison to last week's women's water polo match against LA Trade-Tech. After scoring easily on the first possession, Cerritos was hesitant to even take a shot throughout the rest of the game. Time after time, Cerritos players refused to take a shot on goal, even with an open net. Don't get me wrong, they scored plenty of times (final score 18-0). However, the opportunity to score was not only there at least a dozen more times, but most of the opportunities were begging to be taken. Yet Cerritos simply passed the ball around until the shot clock ran out and they were forced to dump the ball.

So here's the problem: what should a team do when it is playing against a team that simply cannot match up to it? Is it better sportsmanship and respectful to "go easy" on a team and not run up the score to avoid embarrassing them? Or is it just as embarrassing for a team to show it's dominance by NOT scoring? Should the leading team treat its opponent as they would any other team and try it's hardest? Or is running up the score a cardinal sin of sports?

These questions have come up recently at the high school level, with coaches being disciplined for allowing their team to run up the score. A girl's basketball coach in Texas was fired last year after his team beat another school 100-0, and the refused to apologize for doing so. Another girl's basketball in Florida was also fired after being accused of "running up the score" in an "embarrassing" 67-11 win. (The fact that all of the above mentioned examples is not purely coincidental, but a discussion about title IX will be saved for a later post.)

In both instances, the coaches defended their actions by claiming they did everything they possibly could to keep the score from going even higher. They stopped pressing, took out the starters, played a zone defense, stopped running fast breaks, and stopped taking three-pointers. In short, they did everything but stop shooting. So should they coaches have been fired? I don't know. Is what they did wrong or "embarrassing?" No.

The worst thing a team can do when facing a lesser opponent is to treat them as a such by intentionally not scoring. By doing so, it's sending the message that "you're not worth our effort, and we don't need to try against you." No one wants to play in a game where the other team is scoring every time it gets the ball, but it's even worse when they are intentionally NOT scoring when they get the ball. As long as a team has taken all the other practical steps to lower the odds of scoring (i.e., removing starters) it should continue to play the same amount of effort as any other game.

It's especially unfair to the players that spend most of the time on the bench waiting for the chance to get into a game to be told "make sure you take it easy." Some players have such limited opportunities to obtain game-experience, it's a crime not to let them take full advantage of the situation.

So, final score? Women's soccer's handling of the situation 67, women's water polo 11.



What do you think? Is is more unsportsmanlike for a team to keep scoring or to intentionally not score?