The Great Sportsmanship Debate: Michigan U14 Hockey Team Absolutely Steamrolls Their Opponent 43-0 In Playoffs
Grant Faint. Getty Images.Every year we see stories come out of youth sports about massive blowouts. Blowouts are a part of sports, and they usually happen once you get to the high school level. That's when you can really see a major difference between kids who are getting ridiculously good at a sport, and kids who are just playing the game for fun. You'll see it in high school basketball a lot, and sometimes in high school football.
Very rarely are you going to see a score that completely blows your mind when it comes to club hockey where parents are paying thousands and thousands of dollars for their kids to play on these teams. But that's what we got last week when the U14 Little Caesars ice hockey team completely steamrolled the 2010 Belle Tire team.
43-0 with an actual score of 44-0, it's just the dad in the scorers box forgot to add one of the goals up on the board. And even more ridiculous than the final score was the shot totals of this game being 141-0. It's one thing to get completely obliterated and scored on nearly once a minute during the game. But they couldn't even just let one shot fly from anywhere on the ice? If the Belle Tire team touched the puck even once, they should have tried to get it on net. Doesn't matter where they were on the ice, you at least have to put one puck on net.
Now every time a story like this comes out of youth sports, it always fires up the great sportsmanship debate on how you're supposed to handle this situation. When one team is clearly so far superior to another. Do you keep your foot on the gas and continue to score at will? Do you call the dogs off and just play a game of keep-away for half the game? Do you blame the coaches for letting it get out of hand? Do you think blowouts are just a part of sports and can teach the losing team a valuable lesson?
The debate rages on and on. Really, there's no true one way to handle a situation like this. Each one is unique, and deserves a different approach. And for this particular scenario between the 2010 Little Caesars team and the 2010 Belle Tire team, I think there's only one group of people who deserve any blame here.
That would be the parents of the Belle Tire team. I mean what are we even doing here, guys? No offense or anything but if you have a group of kids who are going to lose to any team by a score of 43-0, then there's a strong chance they shouldn't be playing AAA hockey in the first place. But these are all a bunch of parents who want to spend thousands of dollars just to be able to say their son plays Tier I hockey. It's not like this was some regular high school game where the kids don't have any other choice but to play at the level that they're at. These kids could all play Tier II if they wanted to, and maybe they'd have a competitive team. But the parents want to be able to show up to their local rink to talk about their Johnny or Joey playing Tier I. So they'll spend the money, and then send them out there to get slaughtered by Little Caesars in the playoffs.
Don't blame Little Caesars for putting the puck in the back of the net 43 times, and firing off damn near 4 shots every minute. Don't blame the Little Caesars coaches for not calling off the dogs here, and playing the full game considering the playoff rules force them to go the full 48 minutes. Don't blame the Belle Tire kids for giving up, because it sounds like that wasn't the case at all. Just blame their parents for putting them out there in the first place. Not everyone is going to the NHL, guys. At some point you have to be realistic and decide that maybe AAA isn't worth it.