Routs Fuel School Sports Debate nytimes.com
Lakeshore Public Academy in Hart, Mich., has only 50 students and just a handful of sports teams. Academics, not athletics, are supreme. So it is a complete surprise that Lakeshore has become the subject of a debate on sportsmanship and fair play in high school sports.
It began when the Lakeshore girls' basketball team lost to Walkerville High School early this season. Lost badly, in fact, 115-2. . . .
Beginning in 1998, the Michigan High School Athletic Association conducted a three-year experiment in which a running clock was used in both girls' and boys' games after a team went ahead by 40 points. The organizers of the experiment were amazed at the reported scores of girls' games, with outcomes like 87-14, 93-4 and 75-3 being somewhat common. Officials cringed at the thought of what those scores might have been without a running clock.
"We would have had 110- or 120-point disparities," said Mr. Johnson, the association's communications director.
Some people contend, though, that the running clock is not as effective as it might seem. Nina Vanerk, executive director of the New York State Public High School Athletic Association, said it might actually motivate some coaches to run up the score as rapidly as possible in a game.
"Some coaches may want blowouts because they think it can intimidate a future opponent," Ms. Vanerk said. "They get around the running clock by telling their kids to score as much as they can, as quickly as they can."
Some Michigan coaches, in questionnaires they filled out about the experiment, said they did not like the rule because it reduced game time, giving fewer opportunities to substitutes; other coaches said the running clock called attention to the fact that one team was being beaten so badly.
But many approved of the running clock, saying that it was necessary to limit embarrassment. In a game in Michigan in 1998 in which the final score was 59-15, the fourth-quarter score, with a running clock, was only 5-4.
Michigan and Missouri officials petitioned the National Federation of State High School Associations, the powerful rule-making body for 16 boys' and girls' sports at more than 17,000 high schools, to make the running game clock permanent in the states that desired to do so. The clock would no longer stop once a team went ahead by 40 points.
The federation's rules committee approved the proposal, but the board of directors rejected it. Mary Struckhoff, assistant director of the federation, said the board wanted to consider applying the rule nationally, and not solely on a state-by-state basis, as Michigan and Missouri had desired. The board will discuss the proposal again at its annual meeting in Indianapolis next month.
"We believe the girls' high school game is in very good shape," Ms. Struckhoff said. "But the mercy rule is something we want to analyze."
Ms. Struckhoff said that although the proposed rule had been under discussion for some time, the 115-2 score of the Lakeshore-Walkerville game had "put the proposal in the spotlight, because no one wants to see a score like that."
High school sports officials in Michigan, who believe passionately that a mercy rule would improve the quality of the girls' game, considered ignoring the national federation and imposing the rule on their own.
But in the end, Mr. Johnson said, Michigan abided by the federation's decision. If the state had not, Michigan would have lost its ability to vote on other crucial basketball rules, he said.
"In hindsight, I think we still should have done that anyway, because it's a good rule that helps kids," Mr. Johnson said. |
