Riverdale-Smyrna girls’ basketball games usually don’t make the CBS morning news or ESPN talk shows. But one did in late February, after both teams tried to lose the consolation game of the District 7-AAA tournament so they wouldn’t meet national power Blackman in a region tournament elimination round.
For those who didn’t attend the game, the situation was hard to comprehend until the network showed footage. Sure enough, girls were banging free throws off the backboard, taking intentional 10-second back-court calls, going over and back at half-court and dancing around each other on offense and defense. One of the girls tried to score at the other team’s basket.
Rutherford County Schools Director Don Odom suspended Riverdale’s Cory Barrett and Smyrna’s Shawn Middleton from coaching for the 2015–16 season after the TSSAA ruled the teams ineligible for the rest of the tournament, put them on probation for next year and fined the schools $1,500. Smyrna Principal Rick Powell said he had already decided to remove Middleton from coaching.
They both deserve to be fired. But they’re only part of the problem.
Principals put too much pressure on coaches to win, a serious problem in Rutherford County for the last 20 years or more. When that happens, they have little choice but to win at all costs.
Giving young people a chance to have fun playing ball and enjoy their high school years doesn’t mean a damn thing to many coaches and administrators around here. All the coaches care about is winning championships so they can get a little leverage in bargaining with their principals. Recruiting players, skirting practice rules and playing “bracketology” basketball are simply a means to an end.
One of the most disappointing things about this situation is the coaches’ messages to the girls: You’re not good enough to win next week, so lose tonight. Forget about N.C. State’s miracle win over Houston in 1983 and all the other Cinderella stories in the NCAA Tournament over the years, along with hundreds of TSSAA games in which district champions lost the first game of the region tournament and went home for the year. It happens all the time.
There was no guarantee either of these teams would have won the first game of the region tournament so they could get to Blackman, just as there was no guarantee Blackman would win its opener.
The fallout for these girls comes when they look back over their high school careers in 20 years and realize: I tanked it in the 2015 district tournament. It would be a tough way for a senior to go out. For the coaches, both of whom have had good careers, it should be their last game in Tennessee and a lesson to all those who follow.
Unfortunately, when people shell out $6 to go to a game from now on, they’ll be sitting in the stands wondering if one of the girls meant to throw brick after brick at the backboard or if she simply had a bad shooting night.
This will be a tough one to get over for a lot of people, and for a long time. But maybe, just maybe, we all learned a little something about ourselves as a society.
