• Brandon Leonard •
• Originally published January 12, 2009 at 12:41 a.m., updated January 12, 2009 at 12:41 a.m.

Should feelings be spared in sports?

Should coaches pull their teams back when they are dominating a game and worry about how the score of a game is affecting the other team emotionally?

You can argue both ways, some more tearfully than others, but I think you play the game the way it's supposed to be played until time is up.

Sure, I'm the one in the press box praying for a 10-run rule to be accomplished at baseball games so I can leave early, but in other sports we don't have that kind of luxury.

In basketball, the Faith Academy Lady Cougars won on Friday by 65 points and had all but one player score. The players from Bryan Allen Academy couldn't have felt great about their visit to Victoria, but it wasn't the Lady Cougars' fault.

The Cougars also came away with a big win, downing Allen Academy's boys by a score of 101-66. Neither team did anything wrong and neither coach was trying to run up the score.

Faith Academy clearly has a much better basketball program going for itself than that opponent, and shouldn't have had to stoop to the level of competition. They have to continue getting better, and I'm sure the team was able to work on a few things while coming away with their first district win of the year.

But some probably looked at the score and thought the team should have put on the brakes long before coming away with an 81-16 win.

A score like that will catch everyone's attention, but it's one of those things that just happens every once in a while. Sure, Faith Academy could have pulled up, held onto the ball throughout the second half and not have taken as many shots as it did. But what would that have accomplished except for creating a smaller margin of victory?

Either way, the girls from Allen Academy weren't going to leave Faith Academy's gym feeling good. A one-point loss would meant just as much and it will eventually look the same in the record books.

And don't think Faith Academy was the only one with big wins on Friday. The Lady Cobras of Industrial beat Tidehaven by 37, San Antonio Christian beat the St. Joseph Flyers by 26, and the Memorial Vipers lost by 19 at San Antonio Highlands.

None of those schools should be crying about the losses though. What they should be doing is getting back in their gyms and working to get better so it doesn't happen again.

The topic of running up a score is not new and it's not going away.

This football season the Memorial Vipers were a playoff team and experienced losses like 52-7, 58-0 and 49-0. These losses were bad and must have upset the team, but the Vipers never made an issue of teams running up the score on them. Their philosophy was that if they didn't want to see the scoreboard like that then they were going to work hard and get better.

That's what a bad loss can do for a team. Do you think the Vipers aren't using those loses as motivation in the weight room or on the track this offseason? I assume they are, and if they're not then they should be.

But this topic really shouldn't even be an issue for the players and coaches. The parents in the stands and other fans will always be the ones who are more vocal on this, but that's where it should stop.

The players are supposed to play the game. The coaches are supposed to coach. Nowhere in any book is it written that a team has to stop scoring.

It may be one of those unwritten rules, but those are about as valuable as the imaginary paper they're written on.

Wes Bloomquist is a sports writer at the Advocate. Contact him at 361-580-6509 or wbloomquist@vicad.com, or comment on this story at www.VictoriaAdvocate.com.

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