Respecting Your Opponents

I've received comments from well-meaning old-boys expressing concern for the huge score-lines for C Div games. I think it is worth clarifying what we aim to do in order to respect our opponents in games.

We can respect opponents by:

(1) Taking the game seriously and giving your best - playing around is NOT RESPECT

5 years ago we played a certain school in the National Semi-Finals, they had a vastly superior squad and beat us by 10-15 points. Yet during the game, a certain point guard made fun of the team by ridiculing our designated plays.

We called "warriors" for attacking the weak side and "spurs" for attacking the string side. The arrogant boy screamed "lakers", "celtics" during the game and played some fancy passes and laughed when out players got tricked.

That is DISRESPECT. The scoreline was not big, but it their attitude was humiliating.

(2) Not unnecessarily inflating the scoreline

We usually try to work on the weaker part of our game and field our weaker players to gain experience when we are leading by a lot. Yet despite some of these measures, we still win by a huge margin.

That is NOT DISRESPECT. That is a result of a very unbalanced competition field and format.

Would you rather stop trying to play the game properly, execute sloppily, try low-percentage fancy shots, in order to keep the margin smaller?

The scoreline can be one indication of RESPECT but that value cannot be judged by reading a report - one has to be involved in the game to really give a comment.

I remember bringing our A Div boys on a training trip to Taiwan, and we got beaten by an average of 55 points over 3 games. We had 3 national youth players and still ate humble pie. But I never remembered feeling humiliated during those 3 games - only a sense of awe, that our opponents are much better trained and conditioned than we were.

Sure it was not a nice feeling to lose, and maybe some did feel lousy about ourselves. But no one could say we were humiliated. We were certainly humbled, but credit to the Taiwanese, we were not humiliated.

It is not always possible to achieve team training goals and take care of everybody's feelings at the same time. But we have to do our best. And we do that by working on the above 2 approaches.

Having said all, if we unintentionally ran over anybody's sense of dignity, we are sorry and will strive to do better if you will give us good feedback.