It’s time for an encouraging ethics tale, and this is one.
(That’s Pandora above, viewing the last, and only benign, occupant of her famous box. Hope!)
The Academy of Classical Christian Studies high school girls basketball team in Oklahoma City won last season’s division championship game. A last second buzzer-beating basket against Apache High School did the job. But something didn’t feel right to Academy head coach Brendan King …perhaps the faint ping of an ethics alarm. He went home that night and watched the game tape.
“As soon as I walked out of the locker room, my stomach kind of turned into knots. And I said, ‘I’m going to need to know if we really won this game or not,'” King told reporters. Sure enough, when he checked the tape and tallied up the baskets, he discovered his team had actually lost. The true score should have been 43-42, with Apache High the victors and the winners of the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association girls basketball championship. Somehow 2 points had been mistakenly given to King’s team, making it the 43-42 winners.
League rules state that once a game is completed, it is in the books and the records can’t be changed. King decided to tell his team the bad news anyway. The girls unanimously agreed what the right course was, and it was to appeal their own victory. In an unprecedented reversal, the league agreed, and King surrendered the championship plaque to Apache High.
Apache girls basketball head coach Amy Merriweather said that more than the championship, she and her team were grateful for the ethics lesson. “It showed us, you know, there are still good people in this world,” Merriweather said. “It’s something we’ll always remember.”
Indeed.
There is hope.
_____________________
Pointer: Jon
Ethics Alarms 
Squinting eyes.
He ended the game “feeling something was amiss”.
The cynic in me says he saw the extra points added *in game* and let it ride but his conscience got the best of him at the end.
I find it hard to believe that seeing a final score in a traditionally high scoring sport and in the back of his mind his internal score keeper voice didn’t jibe.
Possible, of course. But, ultimately he did the right thing. And, based on the report I saw, the team was all in on doing the right thing, as well. The cynic in me says that once the coach presented the situation, there was no way the team could have done otherwise. Yet, I know there are mostly good people among us, and that looks like the case here.
I thought the same thing. How do you just miss that? And, if you did, how would you have this nagging feeling?
I guess I can see a coach paying more attention to the play than the score itself. If he is watching the play, particularly in a close game, he could feel like he is playing from behind and, when he looks at the score, think it is a closer game than he thought it was. Of course, in that situation, he would not be in a position to check baskets.
but, did no one else notice this? Fans are typically more likely to keep their eyes on the scoreboard. I would be curious to understand how the error occurred and how it was not caught by anybody in real time.
-Jut
I recall similar incidents, usually involving the time allotted for a quarter or period, when last second filed goals or winning baskets were actually too late after the action was matched to the clocks. In fact, that’s what I assumed had happened here before I read the story.
Well done coach and team!
With the way things have been, I truly needed to read a story like that.
Didn’t I read just recently in the comments that why an ethical action is done is irrelevant?
Y’all are letting your cynic flag fly, good for you
And this is a great example of the right thing being done, with the readon and process not changing the ethics verdict at all.
Yes, BUT, if he saw the two points go up on the wrong side of the scoreboard, he could have gone to the scorer’s table and corrected it immediately. He could have even called a timeout and had the officials look into and remedy the situation. That way, his players would have had an opportunity to actually win the game. It’s hard to win a game of you don’t know the score. Thus, I suspect he had the opportunity to avoid the entire situation if he’d acted in a timely fashion. Frankly, I think perhaps he should have just kept his mouth shut after he missed his chance to do the right thing* in real time.
*When is Spike Lee going to stop going to Knicks and now Yankees games?
As is the case all too often, our assessment of the situation is handicapped by poor reporting. Several reports (possibly ‘borrowing’ from the same source) say the coach had an uneasy feeling when he left the locker room, and that there had been some scoreboard confusion at one point in the game. No reports I’ve seen go into detail on just what that confusion was.
I doubt a coach looks at the scoreboard after every scoring play; more likely — watching the players as they carry on with the game.
Here’s my take, purely speculation but I think it’s the most plausible turn of events:
He probably DID see the two extra points erroneously added to his team’s score “in real time” but at that moment figured that two points probably wouldn’t make a difference in who wins and who loses.
. . . until it DID.
THEN he had a dilemma on his hands: He knew that (1) his team had two extra points they shouldn’t have had, and (2) they’d “won” by just one point and those extra two points flipped the loss into a win.
From there, he reviewed the tapes to figure out, prior to raising an issue about the score with anyone else, if he was actually factually correct about the two extra points. On the one hand, it’s a very good thing to first consider “What if I’m the one who’s wrong here?” before taking further action, but on the other hand, he was also probably hoping that he was wrong and his team really did win without it being a mistake.
Again, the ethical act doesn’t require ethical motivations to be an ethical act, so his reasons are irrelevant.
At this point, having confirmed that he was NOT wrong about the scoring error, he chose to bring it to his team’s attention and to to the league’s attention.
I say again, this all just my own speculation, but I think it would explain all of the things that sound or seem “off” about the story.
–Dwayne
That’s a very plausible analysis, DZ. And it would make a good movie…
I like that explanation.
As other commentators have mentioned, poor reporting makes it unclear what the “confusion about the scoreboard” was. One can assume it was regarding the two missing points, but that’s not explicit in the original article.
I’ve been in coaching situations where there is confusion about the score or other record keeping issues, like number of fouls a player has accumulated. The correct course of action is to bring it to the attention of the officials. One hopes they make a review, and then hopes they get the correct answer from the review. At that point, though, even if you disagree with the ruling after the review, further protestation is pointless. It will only get you thrown out of the game.
In some sports, (though according to the article not typically in this particular league), you can make a protest after the game. I saw a game a couple of years ago where they actually brought the players back after the game was over and replayed the last 4 minutes due to an erroneous call by an official. The coach had protested during the game but had been ignored. This has also happened at least once in the NBA.
Assuming the scoreboard confusion was about the two missing points, then the coach did the right thing. The issue was raised, whether by him or someone else. The officials reviewed it. They made their determination. The game moves on. In my mind, going back to review a call that went in his favor after the game was over, and then filing a protest contesting his own victory, makes this coach an ethics hero.
What might absolve the coach of knowing the score was off during the game and choosing not to say something – in a game at that level, EVERYONE is watching the scoreboard and counting the points. I have been at high school games with mistakes in the score and the crowd starts yelling and chanting and pointing at the board. And the fact that the other team did not file a protest means they had not noticed either. In addition, people not noticing would include the person designated from each team to be keeping the book and recording every single play by hand. So in the heat of the game, he may have had the thought, but since no one else was saying anything, especially people who should be paying much more attention, he could have come to the conclusion that he was wrong. But the nagging post game was that he could not get the thought out of his head.