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It has always been my feeling that if you say that you are, "here for the kids," that you can't just mean only "your" kids. As a coach, whenever I am in the situation of being clearly better than my opponent, which doesn't happen often, I always try to keep my perspective by thinking to myself, "What if my daughter was on the other team?" How would I want the better team's coach to act.
This came up once last year. I coach 8th grade girls. We had a remarkable team. I will certainly never have another team like that again. We played a team that we had beaten earlier in the season by 25-30 points. We ran our usual full-court press in the first quarter and led 12-0. We pulled the press off and played straight man-to-man in the second quarter and led at half 20-0.
In the 3rd and 4th quarters we played strictly 3-2 or 2-1-2 zone. No pressing or guarding outside the 3. I told our girls to run our regular offenses. With about one minute left in the game, the score was 42-0. I asked my assistant if we should let them score. We decided it would be more disrespectful to give them a basket than it would be to keep playing.
After the game I went up to the opposing coach and I was at a loss for words. He said, "Hey, don't worry about it. You are about 42 points better than we are. I just didn't think it would be 42-0." Neither did I. I worried for days about how that score would look when it was put in the paper and on our league's website. We really did try to pull off the dogs.
Oh, one other thing about that game. I had 15 girls suited up that night, and every single girl played at least a minute in every single quarter. Like I said, I'll never have another team like that again. I was lucky to have them once.
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