School Basketball Coach Suspended After His Team Drubbed Opponents 92-4

[laughing dog]

Your 2nd sentence rebuts your claim of understanding - the situations are different. You clearly don't understand the difference which means you didn't understand the bolded part regardles of your belief to the contrary.

The distinctions you've made is special pleading. The distress caused is the same.

You are making positive claim - prove it or STFU.

Whether an outcome is desirable or undesirable does not necessarily entail a moral dimension - as anyone remotely capable of reason understands,

You no doubt want to win this semantic argument, but you are indeed claiming it is undesirable for people to behave like assholes and they ought not do it. Avoiding undesirable behaviour because of its negative effect on others is a choice with a moral dimension but if you don't want to call it that, obviously I'm not going to force you.

You are being illogical. If I am forgetful, that may have a negative effect on others, but it does not have a moral dimension. If I am clumsy, it may have a negative effect on others, but it does not have a moral dimension. If I choose to drive my car to the store that is 2 blocks away, that may have a negative effect on others, but it has no moral dimension.

You certainly feel the need to interject some sort of "moral dimension " into this discussion. But no one is compelled to accept your "reasoning" or your rhetoric.

Anyone who is not inept in reason understands that reasoning does not logically lead to "Playing effectively as you can" means "Scoring the most points possible".

Anyone who can read can see I wrote playing the best you can entails scoring points.

Yes, and anyone who is familiar with sports understands that what you wrote is ignorance driven silliness.

 

[laughing dog]

Totally false. There have been plenty of explanations that you either don't understand or don't accept.

It's true I don't accept them, because they are incoherent.

Projection is not analysis.

 

[Metaphor]

You are making positive claim - prove it or STFU.

I am saying if I accept losing by a lot is a reason to change your sporting behaviour, the distinction that it is 'points' versus 'time' does not seem to make a moral difference.

You certainly feel the need to interject some sort of "moral dimension " into this discussion. But no one is compelled to accept your "reasoning" or your rhetoric.

I bet even the people who otherwise support you on this thread would say it is a moral duty to not be an asshole. But you do you.

 

[laughing dog]

You are making positive claim - prove it or STFU.

I am saying if I accept losing by a lot is a reason to change your sporting behaviour, the distinction that it is 'points' versus 'time' does not seem to make a moral difference.

In other words, you are making an assumption about how runners feel. Got it.

You certainly feel the need to interject some sort of "moral dimension " into this discussion. But no one is compelled to accept your "reasoning" or your rhetoric.

I bet even the people who otherwise support you on this thread would say it is a moral duty to not be an asshole. But you do you.

LOL - you cannot defend your ill-defined and poorly thought out argument, so you inject another conjecture to deflect. But you keeping do you - defending assholes and their behavior.

 

[Metaphor]

In other words, you are making an assumption about how runners feel. Got it.

Believe it or not, I've been in running races, and swimming races, in high school. I know how it feels to lose by a large margin.

LOL - you cannot defend your ill-defined and poorly thought out argument, so you inject another conjecture to deflect. But you keeping do you - defending assholes and their behavior.

I do not agree that there is evidence that the coach is an asshole (though apparently there is enough evidence for many people on this thread to not only say he did an asshole thing, but is an asshole). However, I am not deflecting anything. To call someone an asshole is to make a moral judgment about them.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

In the Sacred Hill situation, the team did not ease up at all. The coach is a first class asshole and is lucky he was not suspended for more games.

There was a student in my high school who was mathematically gifted. I remember one particular test where he wrecked the curve for the entire rest of the class. Should he have been told to ease up, lest his mathematical gifts humiliate the other students? Should a long distance runner hold back from achieving a personal best if she is too far ahead of the competition? If not, why not?

In a test you can't know you're running away with it.

 

[Metaphor]

In the Sacred Hill situation, the team did not ease up at all. The coach is a first class asshole and is lucky he was not suspended for more games.

There was a student in my high school who was mathematically gifted. I remember one particular test where he wrecked the curve for the entire rest of the class. Should he have been told to ease up, lest his mathematical gifts humiliate the other students? Should a long distance runner hold back from achieving a personal best if she is too far ahead of the competition? If not, why not?

In a test you can't know you're running away with it.

So, it's the knowing that is the moral difference? Runners know they are ahead, don't they? Do runners have an obligation to ease up?

In later tests, should the student have eased back on how many questions he got right? (This particular test, he was so far ahead it was humiliating, but he was always at the top of the mathematics class).

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It’s not unusual for one student to regularly blow the curve for any class. The instructor has some choices, though. They can set an absolute grading scale, so if the entire class scores 100, they all get A’s, etc. in more subjective classes, they can grade very gifted students with greater rigor than the rest of the class. I’ve seen that done. I’ve also seen instructors add bonus questions that anyone may attempt but which are intended to give the very gifted student a challenge. And I’ve seen instructors give certain students a different test altogether. A good instructor does not share that they do this with the class and may or may not choose to do so with the especially gifted : Lawrence, I’m only awarding you a B+ on this essay because it is not up to the standard I know you are capable of achieving. Please put greater thought into how you support your major and minor themes…

And so on. I’ve seen that done.

And a professor that's worth anything will do something to keep a blowout from giving the rest of the students all bad grades.

 

[Toni]

To tell the truth, I thought I had explained it to you like you are five years old. Or ten, maybe. The overall lesson is that it isn’t ok to deliberately hurt other peoples feelings or to make them feel bad because you are better at something than they are ( or richer or smarter or more beautiful, etc.). Sometimes, we hurt peoples’ feelings by accident. Sometimes, people allow their feelings to be hurt when there was no offense intended.

A race is not the same as a basketball game. A race, except for relays, is individual competitors. But, if I were racing abs were beaten by a fraction of a second, I would look at small mistakes I had made that slowed me down. If I lost by a large margin, I’d re-think my race all together, and all of my training—and try to improve.

If I lost my race to someone who literally was running circles around me, running backwards, etc., I would think that the person who beat me was an utter and complete asshole and showed horrible sportsmanship. It would not inspire me to anything except anger —which I would need to control so as not to show poor sportsmanship myself and I would also feel a desire to avoid that person in any setting in the future. Poor sportsmanship is rarely confined to one competition. People can learn to not be poor sports but they need a framework to understand that their behavior affects how other people feel. Making other people feel bad about themselves does not help them learn to improve their skills.

I’m not certain that an athletic board can

It’s not unusual for one student to regularly blow the curve for any class. The instructor has some choices, though. They can set an absolute grading scale, so if the entire class scores 100, they all get A’s, etc. in more subjective classes, they can grade very gifted students with greater rigor than the rest of the class. I’ve seen that done. I’ve also seen instructors add bonus questions that anyone may attempt but which are intended to give the very gifted student a challenge. And I’ve seen instructors give certain students a different test altogether. A good instructor does not share that they do this with the class and may or may not choose to do so with the especially gifted : Lawrence, I’m only awarding you a B+ on this essay because it is not up to the standard I know you are capable of achieving. Please put greater thought into how you support your major and minor themes…

And so on. I’ve seen that done.

And a professor that's worth anything will do something to keep a blowout from giving the rest of the students all bad grades.

Exactly.

 

[Metaphor]

To tell the truth, I thought I had explained it to you like you are five years old. Or ten, maybe.

No, you didn't. You explained what you thought, but you have yet to explain the moral difference between the basketball team winning by a lot and a runner winning by a lot. You really haven't. Saying 'points' vs 'time' cannot be what would make the difference between a moral requirement to change your sporting behaviour mid-stream versus no such moral requirement. Saying one is a team sport versus an individual sport surely cannot be the moral difference either--if anything someone would be more humiliated losing as an individual.

I then challenged you to explain the rules for not being an asshole in a girls basketball game. I do not mean 'do not be an asshole', because you already think the coach is an asshole (how essentialist of you), and how would he know how to act differently? No: I mean--since you believe neither the coach nor I are decent people, explain what a decent person would have done. Remember, we lack empathy and do not understand decency, so your reference point has to be like writing a computer program.

 

[laughing dog]

In other words, you are making an assumption about how runners feel. Got it.

Believe it or not, I've been in running races, and swimming races, in high school. I know how it feels to lose by a large margin.

Good. Then you should understand that the point of a race is to run as fast as you can.

The point of playing a team game is to win by playing within the rules and with good sportsmanship.

 

[Metaphor]

Good. Then you should understand that the point of a race is to run as fast as you can.

The point of playing a team game is to win by playing within the rules and with good sportsmanship.

So: good sportsmanship is not part of individual races? Or rather, I suspect you would say 'the humiliation you cause the losing runners by your margin of victory is not considered in the definition of 'good sportsmanship' in individual running races'.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No, basketball is different than track. In track, the fastest time is the fastest time. The second fastest time can bing to a different team, third place to a third team or one of the first two, etc. I don’t remember how many points one gets for the best time or for second, etc. It also depends on the toe if meet: cross country is one toe of meet. A different type of meet has different t types of competition: relays, sprints, middle and long distance, high jump, broad jump, pole vault, shot put, etc. different team members compete in different events and some will compete in multiple events. Except for relays, each competitor is scored individually.

One team can have the fastest runner in 3 states and still not win a meet or even that event if they don’t have enough excellent team members to take second, third, compete in different events, etc. performances are individual with a aggregate team score.

This. I've actually seen it happen. Back in high school I was on the chess team. (Yes, it's an actual sport--surprised me to find that out.) There were competitions where I won every game I played, yet we never had a hope of winning the competition. (We had only two decent players but had to field a team of 5.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

My husband's grandfather was a pretty good chess player. When my husband was a child, his grandfather taught him to be a pretty decent chess player---by playing with fewer pieces until his grandson could hold his own, at least a bit, gradually increasing his own level of playing as his grandson could withstand a bit--and taught him not only how to play chess well, but sportsmanship and compassion and encouraged him enough not to give up but to keep trying, that he could learn to do better.

It's not different in competitive sports. If coaches taught skills by punishingly beating their students by outplaying them at (insert whatever sport you like), the kids would likely give up before they actually learned. Instead, adults--parents, coaches, teachers, uncles, etc. teach children (or lesser skilled adults who may be their peers in other respects or even superior in some skills) teach a little at a time, meeting the student at the student's skill level and then helping them gain more skills.

This. If the match is sufficiently uneven you handicap the stronger.

 

[Terrell]

I don't think that the coach should be suspended. Even if it was a 222-0 beatdown. If you're getting the shit kicked out of you, then you need to find a way to play better or maybe basketball just isn't for you.

 

[Jarhyn]

I will say, it's been quite educational to say the least seeing who here reveals themselves as supporting this behavior vs who rejects it.

I can't say it's been surprising, though.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I don't think that the coach should be suspended. Even if it was a 222-0 beatdown. If you're getting the shit kicked out of you, then you need to find a way to play better or maybe basketball just isn't for you.

If they are winning 90something to 4 clearly the opposition is a team they shouldn't even be playing. That isn't a 'they shouldn't be playing basketball', it is a 'one team has a much better pool of players to choose from' thing.

 

[Jarhyn]

I don't think that the coach should be suspended. Even if it was a 222-0 beatdown. If you're getting the shit kicked out of you, then you need to find a way to play better or maybe basketball just isn't for you.

If they are winning 90something to 4 clearly the opposition is a team they shouldn't even be playing. That isn't a 'they shouldn't be playing basketball', it is a 'one team has a much better pool of players to choose from' thing.

It's a highschool team. Every team plays every other. As to whether THAT is appropriate, it's an entirely different question, I think.

Here, the question is "why, of what is clearly a much larger highschool, do we not expect them to seat proportionate numbers of players so that they may select a set of them such that the set selected is still better than the team, or even their equals, while running the first press with the starters, and subbing them in if the score diverges?"

If a school has more students, this just means that a larger percentage of their student body is being excluded from the sport. That's not even fair to the students at the bigger school who wish to play, even if it's vs the smaller district teams.

 

[TV and credit cards]

I don't think that the coach should be suspended. Even if it was a 222-0 beatdown. If you're getting the shit kicked out of you, then you need to find a way to play better or maybe basketball just isn't for you.

If they are winning 90something to 4 clearly the opposition is a team they shouldn't even be playing. That isn't a 'they shouldn't be playing basketball', it is a 'one team has a much better pool of players to choose from' thing.

It's a highschool team. Every team plays every other. As to whether THAT is appropriate, it's an entirely different question, I think.

Here, the question is "why, of what is clearly a much larger highschool, do we not expect them to seat proportionate numbers of players so that they may select a set of them such that the set selected is still better than the team, or even their equals, while running the first press with the starters, and subbing them in if the score diverges?"

If a school has more students, this just means that a larger percentage of their student body is being excluded from the sport. That's not even fair to the students at the bigger school who wish to play, even if it's vs the smaller district teams.

This is starting to remind me of Harrison Bergeron. We could make the better team strap on ankle weights.

We don't know what advantages one school might have over another. Small pool of talent or large to select from. Mountains of cash for support or BYOB. Or possibly other impediments to training one might have that another does not. This is just another reason sportsmanship is so important.

 

[ZiprHead]

Good. Then you should understand that the point of a race is to run as fast as you can.

The point of playing a team game is to win by playing within the rules and with good sportsmanship.

So: good sportsmanship is not part of individual races? Or rather, I suspect you would say 'the humiliation you cause the losing runners by your margin of victory is not considered in the definition of 'good sportsmanship' in individual running races'.

Individual racing is not only about beating your competition but beating yourself.