Finally, a Good News Youth Sports Story

I have been writing this blog for over two years now and the ratio of bad to good stories about youth sports stories is not good. Like they say in the newspaper business, “if it bleeds it leads” and the same seems to go for the blog writing business.  Week after week I look for positive youth sports stories only to find stories about parents abusing coaches and game officials, children behaving badly during and following games, the costs of travel/elite/select teams exploding, pricing regular families out of the game while coaches/parents are taking legitimate game decisions to court to get the results overturned.  Stories about positive youth sporting experiences are rare and often difficult to find.  About two weeks ago, while scrolling Facebook, I found a CBS story about an Oklahoma girls' basketball team returning their championship after realizing they lost the championship game.

Briefly stated, a scoreboard error gave the Academy of Classical Studies the win over Apache High School.  In an article written by Jose Olivares in The Guardian, Academy coach Brenden King told the network “As soon as I walked out of the locker room, my stomach turned into knots.  And I said: ‘I’m going to need to know if we really won this game or not.’”  King watched a recording of the game, recounting every basket, eventually discovering his team lost.  King found his team lost 43-42 instead of 44-43.  King went to the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association to explain the situation and they stated, “once the game was over, the score remains permanent, and there is no change of a completed game.”  King then discussed the matter with his team, and they voted to appeal, on their own, to the School Activities Association to have Apache High School acknowledged as the winner. The appeal, having no precedent, succeeded and King delivered the championship plaque to Apache High School.  Amy Merriweather, the coach of Apache High School stated she was ‘happy to have won the title, the said that the act of honesty and integrity meant more than the actual victory.”

            Wow, there is quite a bit to unwrap in this little story. A coach realizing a mistake was made, a group of high school girls willing to give up a trophy that they thought they had won and could have kept, a High School Athletic Association not willing to change the result of a game because of their rules even though a coach brought the fact that there was a mistake to their attention.  Let’s take each of these one at a time.

            The coach. The coach needs to be commended for his actions. He realized there was an error in the scoring, did the necessary review, admitted there was a mistake made and did what he could to rectify the situation. In today’s day and age, I cannot think of too many coaches that would take a championship away from his team and give it to the other team. He could have kept quiet and kept the championship, or taken what the School Activities Association said, “once the game is finished, the score becomes permanent” and he probably would have been justified in taking the Associations ruling, taking the win, after all he could have just said “the Association said the game was over and that’s it.”  I think what he did was a great act of sportsmanship and he taught his player a great lesson…honesty and integrity mean something, a lesson they will take with them into life long after their basketball careers are over.

            The girls on the team.  How many players would actively unanimously decide to appeal a victory that could be turned into a loss causing them to lose the championship. During the CBS interview, the girls on the Academy team said that it “would have felt wrong if they got the championship the way they did” and it was “a teaching moment for them and winning isn’t the only thing.”  Those sentiments are amazingly mature for high school students, especially with the “winner takes all” attitude that permeates sports these days. I can remember playing high school soccer and baseball and if this situation ever happened to me/my team I’m not sure I could have voted to give up a championship, especially if an athletic association said once the score is final its final, yet these girls did just that.

            The Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association.  While I can respect the rules the association has in place, I feel that they should have agreed to give Apache the championship after Coach King pointed out the discrepancy in the score.  Now, like I say when discussing the legal cases I write about, I was not in the room when the decision was rendered so I have no idea what the rational was when the decision was made, but my thoughts are still that they should have had some leeway when making the decision about the game before the Academy girls voted to appeal their own victory.  By voting to appeal their own victory, the Activities Association really had no choice but to rescind the championship and award it to Apache.

            The conclusion of this story shows that there are still good people in the world who will do the right thing.  One quote I can remember from many of my trainings while working is “character is something that you do when no one is looking” and these girls showed the world that they have tremendous character.