Sussex County Sports Blog

By Dan Cleary

1/27/2009 - Coaches Sit On Hot Seat

The sports section of the newspaper usually provides its readers a daily break from the recent travails of the world, be it the tough economy or the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the world of sports can deliver a much needed distraction.

But the news in the sports world isn’t always rosy and there were a couple of stories last week that not only caught my attention, but that of the whole country.

I’m referring to the high school girls basketball coach in Dallas who was fired after his school, won 100-0, and the high school football coach in Kentucky who was indicted and then plead not guilty to a charge of reckless homicide in the heat-related death of one of his players last summer.

First, the basketball coach. Now, I have seen my fair share of blowouts over the years, but nothing close to 100-0. Back in the early 1990s before the rest of the Sussex County Interscholastic League caught up with Sparta in girls basketball, the Spartans would routinely win games by 30, 40 points and would come close to scoring 100 points.

Some coaches and parents of teams on the losing ends of those scores would accuse Sparta coach Fred Geffken of running up the score and padding his players stats. Yes, on paper, when you see a final score of 93-29, for example, it is startling, and one could assume that the opposing coach was running up the score.

But anyone who knows Fred Geffken, knows he is not out to embarrass anyone. As I mentioned, some of those Sparta teams in the 1990s would flirt with 100, but do you know why they never hit the century mark? That’s right, Geffken. Fred would not allow his third-stringers, who were in the game for a quarter-plus already, reach 100.

In fact, Geffken crunched some numbers for me a long time ago when it came to former Spartan superstar Lisa Olsen. The 6-foot-1 scoring machine pumped in 1,952 career points in four seasons before going onto play at Manhattan College.

According to Geffken, Olsen would have easily scored over 2,000 points and challenged the all-time girls SCIL scoring mark of 2,172 points set by Linda Cordes of Newton in the mid -1970s if he didn’t bench her in blowout wins.

Geffken told me that it was very rare that Olsen was able to play a full game because Sparta was winning by such large margins, and because of that, Olsen missed out on the record. So much for the theory that Geffken was padding his players stats by keeping them in the game too long. Although, I bet there are still plenty of people out there who feel differently.

At that time, Sparta’s bench players would have battled for second place in the Sussex County Interscholastic League. I remember when my sister, Liz, was coaching Vernon at the time, she was asked if she thought Fred was running up the score on her teams. And she replied, “No, it is not his responsibility to stop his team from scoring, it is ours.”

You may agree or disagree with that statement, but there is a lot of truth to it. But for as long as scores have been kept in games, the age-old question has always been out there: When do you call off the dogs?

Apparently never if you are Micah Grimes of Covenant School, whose team blanked Dallas Academy last week. At least when Sparta was winning big, the other teams scored, albeit some struggled to reach 20 points, but they did score.

Grimes’ squad led 59-0 at the half. That’s right, 59-0. If it were a football game in New Jersey, the Mercy Rule would have kicked in. Although it is a Christian school, Coach Grimes wasn’t very Christian-like to let the score escalate to 100 in the second half.

Okay, let me play Devil’s Advocate for a second. Let’s just say that Grimes got caught up in the moment and realized that his team was doing something remarkable, yet very unsportsmanlike, and allowed it to happen and then apologized. All right, you messed up, don’t do it again, and everyone moves on.

Uh-huh. Nope, not Coach Grimes. He even e-mailed local reporters after his school publicly apologized, that he didn’t agree with its stance and that his team, “played with honor and integrity.”

He was promptly fired and rightfully so. Let’s get one thing clear here, the players on the team are not at fault, this one lands clearly on the coach and to whomever scheduled the game in the first place.

No matter what the coach says, there is no place in high school sports for a team to win a basketball game 100-0. There is no excuse, period. Case closed. When it was 59-0 at the half, the “adult” who was in charge, and I use that term loosely, should have stepped in and stopped the game, if not then, but after three quarters.

And the kicker to the story is that Dallas Academy only has eight players on its team and the school specializes in teaching students struggling with “learning differences” like short attention spans or dyslexia.

Way to go, Coach Grimes, you really showed them.

So the next time you see a blowout just be happy Coach Grimes isn’t coaching and appreciate the class that Geffken displayed many times over the years.

All right, onto the football coach in Kentucky. Last summer was a terrible one when it came to scholastic football players passing away in football-related deaths. It seemed like every time I picked up the paper or watched the news a terrible tragedy had occurred.

But in this particular case in Kentucky, criminal charges were brought against David Jason Stinson, the head football coach at Pleasure Ridge High School, after one his players, 15-year-old Max Gilpin, died of complications of heatstroke three days after collapsing at practice.

Wow. What an interesting case, a case that could set a nationwide precedent when it comes to criminal liability on the playing field. I don’t know all the facts of the case, but if it is proven that the coach was reckless, then he deserves whatever punishment that is meted out.

That said, such a ruling would have far-reaching effects in the world of high school sports and how coaches train and coach players. When I played, there wasn’t much sympathy for players and it could get brutal, so you had to “suck it up.” But those days are over, like it or not.

But I have never met a coach who intentionally wanted his or her players to die, either. So like the basketball game, when is enough? That is the fine line coaches have to walk every day they put on a whistle. I don’t envy coaches these days, it is a lot different from when I played.

So I’m sure every coach in America will be paying close attention to how things unfold in Kentucky. Their freedom may depend on it.

All right, enough of the bad news, I want to end this blog on a positive note, and I will. As I said, sports should be a haven and for me it was after attending three great sporting events last week.

Watching Vernon’s boys swim team nip Pope John 89-81 in a meet that came down to the final event was thrilling. But watching the Pope John girls swim team continue to steamroll with its 42nd straight SCIL win was a thing of beauty as well.

Then I had the absolute pleasure of watching High Point’s wild 64-63 triple-overtime win over Pope John in girls hoops in one that was for the ages. And I capped the week watching one of the best wrestling matches you will ever see as High Point was bumped off by Long Branch 28-27 on criteria (matches won, 8-6) before a big crowd at the RAC at Rutgers.

So, no matter what bad news seeps into the sports section, it can’t trump all the good that high school sports are all about. Always keep that in mind.

That’s it for now, see you on the sidelines.

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Sussex County Sports Blog

By Dan Cleary

1/27/2009 - Coaches Sit On Hot Seat