I had a team this year up 30 and pressing, legally. I was not happy, but there's nothing you can do.

Conversely, I had another game in which a team was up 30, and they threw the ball around for about two minutes. When the coach saw enough, and he wanted to get subs in, instead of calling time out, he just had the ball dumped out of bounds. That was a better day.

Did I mention I love my state's HS sports association? :D

Peace

With a 40 point mercy rule, I think it's a commonly accepted sportsmanship practice to play starters, press, whatever until the 40 point mark is reached. At that point, the press should be immediately pulled, and subs should start coming in. Even though the game is in hand, I actually think it's more merciful to keep pushing to 40, rather than dragging it out.

It's like an old dog that's suffering, sometimes it's better to just put them out of their misery...

Had a boys game last year that was not close and the schools did not like each other. Running clock in the fourth.....winning team was trying to get to a hundred with starters mostly in. Insert the officiating crew, got together at the first timeout and agreed to take our time. I know that may not be popular with some of you and that's OK. They finished with 94 points and had the ball on offense for each possession for at most ten seconds, obviously trying to embarrass the other team. On free throws they immediately shot the ball the second they received it. I just wanted to paint a picture of how obvious and unsportsmanlike it was.

I woulda been furious to see this charity thrown my way. Like other people said this is way more embarassing. I've called timeout up by alot late and told the officials it's a substitution timeout only. I don't even talk to my players.

More importantly, they should never have scheduled this game.

Yes there is, call fouls.

If it's a conference game (this time of year it likely was), they had no choice.

Not all of our CIF-SS leagues start before Christmas (ours and a few of the larger ones do) and this was a non-league conference.A fact that newspaper writers here won't mention because AremRed stated the point that I put in a newspaper response-this game never should have been scheduled?

I understand the concept of not running the score up on a team. I had the good fortune to play basketball for a H.S. that was the team to beat for the 21 years that my head coach was in charge. There were many years he had teams that he could have easily scored 100+ points in a game a couple of times a year. I played on his 17th, 18th, and 19th teams and I played on the first of his teams that finally scored 100 points in a game. We were up 56 to 20 at half time. My coach played his 2nd and 3rd stringers all of the 2nd half and did not press, and yet the 2nd and 3rd stringers hung 60 points on our opponent in the 2nd half. You can't tell the subs not to play hard. You just have to teach them to be humble in victory and gracious in defeat.

MTD, Sr.

You apparently missed the part where I said the team was pressing LEGALLY. We indeed were looking, but I'm not going to create phantom fouls to make a point.

HS basketball is not a pro basketball development league.

And the winning coach should get suspended for being extremely tone deaf.

Wouldn't happen here -- with a running clock, I would be as pokey as possible on every dead ball.

There's no life lesson here for anyone - unless you are a total a$$hole out to prove that some school shouldn't have a basketball team because they are bad.

And the running clock part is what I really don't understand. The article says that the running clock kicked in after the first quarter...no possible way a team should be scoring that many points with 3/4 of the game being running clock. Like Rich says, I am finding ways to be really slow at everything we do.

Shameful
 

Johnny, I don't know who you are but I certainly hope you're being sarcastic. There is no place for an outcome like this in interscholastic athletics...and according to the article, this isn't the first time this coach has run up the score.

An update
http://www.dailybulletin.com/sports/...ter-161-2-loss

My commentary on this is in the lower part of the article-below the advertisement.