Lopsighted

The coach of a high school girl's basketball team was fired after a game on January 13th ended with the score of 100-0. Here's the strange part: the head coach in question, Micah Grimes of The Covenant School in Dallas, Texas, represented the victorious party.

After the lopsided win, the headmaster of the school sent an e-mail to a local paper to apologize for the gross margin of victory. When he learned of this, Grimes followed the e-mail with one of his own, explaining how he refused to apologize for anything. For that, he was relieved of his position.

No one should be ashamed for the score of the game, least of all the winners. The Covenant School played a truly complete of shutout basketball, something thought of as a near impossibility. Even their opponents at the Dallas Academy should be proud of never giving up. Dallas Academy has only eight girls on its squad; that is out of approximately twenty girls who attend the school. It's fair to say that their coach can't afford to be overly selective.

At the same time, Micah Grimes and his group should not be punished for playing competitively. Grimes claims that he was not trying to run up the score. His team simply over matched the opposition and enjoyed a solid victory. Whether or not that warranted any regret is for him to decide. Hopefully, Covenant started using bench players once they had such a big lead. And if that is the case, it simply shows that they are simply a very outstanding team. Except now, instead of an outstanding team looking forward to the rest of the season, they are an outstanding team with a bad reputation and without their head coach.

Sportsmanship is not about winning and losing, much less how much you win or lose by. So long as both teams maintained respect for one another and played with dignity and honor, even a rout can have sportsmanship. Sportsmanship is more about attitude than numbers.

Here are several other of the most one-sided games in sport's history:

• In 1916, Georgia Tech football team beat that of Cumberland College 222-0 and did not allow a first down.
  
• The Chicago Bears beat the Washington Redskins 73-0 in the 1940 professional football championship.
  
• In 2007, the Texas Rangers won 30-3 over the Baltimore Orioles. The Orioles actually led the game 3-0 after the third inning.
  
• The same year, the Slovakian women's hockey team crushed Bulgaria 82-0 in an Olympic qualifying match.
• During a 2002 soccer match between two teams in Madagascar, one team's coach demanded that his team score goals on themselves in protest for poor officiating during a previous game. Although the opposing team did not score a single goal, his team lost 149-0. The coach was suspended from international soccer for three years, along with several of his players.